Long-awaited government portal nears reality

From...

June 26, 2000
Web posted at: 10:38 a.m. EDT (1438 GMT)

by William Matthews

(IDG) -- The General Services Administration plans within a month to hire a company or group of companies to construct WebGov and to have the long-awaited government-wide Internet portal in operation this fall.

The portal is intended to make it easier for average Internet users to find government information that is now scattered across thousands of agency World Wide Web pages.

The goal is to have the portal "link to every federal page on the Web," said Tom Freebairn, WebGov project director. However, GSA will initially ask agencies to identify only their 10 to 20 most frequented Web sites so the portal can link to them, Freebairn said.

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WebGov has been estimated to cost $5 million to $20 million to develop, Freebairn told a gathering of federal Web masters on Thursday. GSA hopes to keep costs toward the lower estimate, he said.

Individual companies and teams of companies are expected to present portal construction proposals to GSA next month. To win a contract to construct the federal portal, builders will have to be able to create Web pages, set up and operate a server farm, create and maintain databases and operate "spiders" that will search the Internet for government data and record its address and contents in a database to be used by the portalās search engine.

WebGov is expected to work "very much like Yahoo," Freebairn said. The builders will probably develop new search tools for it and create topic trees that will make it possible to search across agencies for information that is related by subject matter, he said. "We have to figure out ways to harvest information" so people can access it more easily, Freebairn said.

Planning for WebGov began at least two years ago but lacked momentum until President Clinton endorsed the idea in December 1999. The president suggested that government information would be easier to find if it was no longer organized according to the agencies that maintain it but "by the type of service or information that people may be seeking."

Organizing information in that way may do more than just simplify searches, it might create new avenues for government reform, Freebairn said. A search for information on exporting regulations, for example, might turn up conflicting regulations imposed by the multiple agencies.

Similarly, more than 40 federal agencies administer grants, but few follow the same procedures. With access to information on grants made easier by the portal, agencies might be encouraged to adopt common practices.

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