A portal for access to complex distributed information about energy

Abstract

The Digital Government Research Center (DGRC) has completed phase one of the Energy Data Collection (EDC) project. In this paper, we present the results of building and evaluating system components, along with plans for phase two of the project. Phase one focused on data about petroleum products' prices and volumes, provided by the Energy Information Administration, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Census Bureau, and the California Energy Commission, in the form of over 50,000 data tables. This research centers on providing dynamically planned access to multiple non-homogeneous databases and other data collections, using a query planner and a largescale (90,000-node) concept ontology and a domain model, both of which are accessed via various interfaces, including cascaded menus, a natural language question analyzer, and an ontology browser. Other data access research focuses on the caching and very fast display of massive amounts of data. In order to more rapidly construct the domain models, systems were developed for automatically identifying terminology glossary files from websites, extracting and formalizing the glossary definitions, clustering them appropriately, and automatically embedding them into the existing ontology and domain model. Work on evaluation focuses on measuring the effectiveness of the use of this system by a variety of users at various levels of expertise.