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What is Digital Government Research?

Date & Time:
16:00:00 - 17:30:00,
Monday 26 November, 2007

About

Digital Government (eGovernment) research has become increasingly prominent over the past six to eight years, and has given birth to two stable international conference series, several journals, and at least one international professional research society. However, no-one seems to be able to define it: is DG a coherent research field, or just a collection of researchers all interested in some (disparate) aspect(s) of government? In this talk I outline the various components that make up DG, considering the roles of government workers, researchers in fields as diverse as political science, computer science, organization and management, law, ethics, and public policy, and government staff. I present a model for DG research that suggests how balanced DG research can be achieved, and argue for the contents of an ‘ideal’ DG research paper.

If there is interest, I can briefly describe a few of the research projects that have been performed since 1999 at the University of Southern California’s Digital Government Research Center. They focus on computer science (IT) research on the problems of data interoperability, text analysis of letters from the public to the government, and metadata and ontology learning.

Data Dump to delete

Speakers

  • Name: Dr Eduard Hovy
  • Affiliation: Digital Government Research Center, University of Southern
    California
  • Role:
  • URL: http://www.isi.edu/~hovy
  • Bio: Dr Eduard Hovy is a Deputy Division Director at the University of Southern California’s (USC) Information Sciences Institute (ISI) in Los Angeles. He is also a research faculty member of USC’s Computer Science Department and an Advisory Professor at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. Dr Hovy currently serves as President-Elect of the North American Digital Government Society (he chaired the committee that created the society’s constitution in 2005-06). He has actively participated in the establishment and growth of research in Digital Government in the USA since the inception of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Digital Government research program in 1999. Dr Hovy was a founding member of the NSFs Digital Government Conference series dg.o and served as program chair in 2001 and 2002 and as co-conference chair in 2003 and 2004.

Papers