e-Gov
IT.com's search solution is tailored to the e-Gov initiative.
The e-Government Act of 2002 lays out requirements for making government web content easier for the public to find and use. This includes improving the way information is organized and incorporating high-quality search as a fundamental part of citizen-centered, results-oriented, and market-based information portals.
Specifically, Section 207 of the act specifies minimum agency goals for assisting users, including improvements in:
- the relevance of search results
- tools to aggregate and disaggregate data
- the speed of retrieval of search results
- security protocols to protect information
IT.com's search solution is tailored to the e-Gov initiative.
Search Relevance
IT.com's citation ranking technology allows us to look outside of the document set to be searched, and find authorities that are highly regarded by your target audience. We then use these authorities when ranking search results to ensure that search results are ranked in a way that is relevant to the perspective of your user.
Organizing Information
IT.com's topic discovery technology allows us to automatically discover and present naturally occurring topics, specific to your search corpus, that can be presented to users in response to their search. This allows them to "organize" their search results, and also to execute additional searches within a given topic, making their information discovery process more efficient and effective.
Furthermore, this hierarchy of topics can be used elsewhere in the site for browsing the document collection as a whole. We can even leverage a pre-existing taxonomy, if you have one, and train the system to organize documents into it.
Search Performance
Two issues prevail when trying to sustain a high level of search performance. First, you need to be able to easily take advantage of performance upgrades in the underlying technology. Second, you need to ensure the system can scale and plan both hardware and facilities to support it.
IT.com’s hosted solution handles both if these issues automatically. First, upgrades to our software can be automatically deployed, without a costly acquisition process, and without involving on-site IT staff. We simply upgrade the software on our servers, and you’re instantly utilizing the best technology we have. Second, IT.com handles all of the capacity provisioning, bandwidth allocation, facility selection, hardware procurement, and system optimization necessary to grow your installation with your increasing search traffic. We include a Service Level Agreement ("SLA"), which means you are purchasing search performance, and the details are left to us.
When deploying our service as an "appliance", IT.com provides well-defined performance characteristics that can be reliably used for capacity planning. We work with federal clients to ensure that appliance capability is well-matched with expected performance requirements.
Security
Because IT.com’s technology runs in its own environment, the traditional security concerns regarding access to internal systems and content repositories that you find with packaged software are mitigated. Our solution, in either hosted or appliance deployment configurations, interacts with no internal systems or servers, other than web servers that have already been made available online. We leverage your existing security infrastructure governing the publishing of documents to the web, and require no new security protocols to implement.