National Biological Information Infrastructure

 

Background

The U.S. Geological Survey coordinates and operates the NBII. It is comprised of many partners, government agencies, academic institutions, non-government organizations, and private industry. As a Web-based program, the NBII links diverse, high-quality biological databases, information products, and analytical tools. The NBII’s mission is to make biological information widely available to a wide range of constituents and stakeholders, including:

1) Public agencies that need access to biological data for managing public lands;

2) Private sector groups that need to understand such things as the impact of metropolitan growth on ecological resources;

3) Scientists, who need access to the highest quality data to design and direct their research;

4) Educators at all levels who need the most relevant and stimulating materials available to motivate and enlighten students; and

5) Private citizens needing unbiased information on regional and local trends, and the role of humans on the environment.

The Business Problem

Implementing a corporate Web policy for NBII could only be effective if there were systems in place to validate and monitor the effective implementation of that policy. One of the biggest challenges facing enterprise customers is the ability to manage solutions for content quality test management across a large de-centralized organization.

“How people search for information varies widely between individuals,” according to Mike Frame, Technology Director for the NBII. “I’m a firm believer that if you have information on the Web, it should be open to everyone, and that the information should be accessible, available, searchable and presentable in a many ways to accommodate different research styles.”

NBII content contributors are located around the country and information in the NBII data repositories and collections, accessed through Intranet and Internet portals, come from a wide variety of decentralized sources. For NBII, creating a “common look and feel, ” implementing a system for Search, improving the usability of biological information, and addressing federal content quality and accessibility standards, such as Section 508 and privacy policies, across this broad and decentralized organization is an enterprise undertaking.

The Solution

HiSoftware Company provides a solution to NBII’s key issues. As their Web presence expands and diversifies, they have solutions to manage their search, accessibility, privacy, structure, and traffic management issues.

Search and Metadata

The first issue that they addressed was searchability of their and selected partner sites information. NBII discovered HiSoftware’s Search and Metadata Solutions-TagGen and Hi-Search. These solutions provided NBII with the tools necessary to create, monitor and maintain Metadata based search across NBII’s document and resource collections. TagGen is an automated metadata tagging solution that allows NBII to create their own controlled vocabularies, or unique metatags – for example, “species”. This one feature has dramatically impacted search relevancy. Before adding the customized metatags, an Internet search for the term ‘Loon’ would generate 13 million hits. Adding unique metatags narrowed the search to 1400. NBII also implemented HiSoftware’s server side solution TagGen Catalog, a metadata-only search engine from HiSoftware, to further refine both search relevancy and speed for Internal searching across the NBII Intranets.

Content Quality and Accessibility

The next task of NBII was to monitor their Web content for compliance with corporate standards for Accessibility, Privacy, Searchability and Usability. NBII needed a system for platform independent and scalable enterprise-wide content policy management. HiSoftware solutions provided NBII with a combination of server side remote applications that allow for automated and remote testing and user-driven interactive desktop solutions that allow developers to test their content for conformance with standards.. HiSoftware’s AccMonitor is a back-end automated server solution that verifies and validates multiple webs on multiple servers, regardless of the actual server location and server platform. AccMonitor allows NBII to monitor it’s own sites and partner sites, which are decentralized and hosted around the country, from a single central location. AccMonitor provides automated reporting and validation that these sites are in compliance with U.S. Federal Regulations for Accessibility and Privacy, USGS Departmental policies, and also NBII specific organizational policies mandating a “common look and feel” for these NBII funded sites. Today, NBII is also using HiSoftware’s user-driven interactive desktop solutions, AccVerify and AccRepair along with AccMonitor to address and remediate content quality and accessibility issues and to create automated tests for validation of their XML Metadata schemas.

Site Management and Promotion

An additional challenge facing NBII was to put a system in place to assist IT managers and Web managers in monitoring the structural integrity of their enterprise Web sites, by scanning and analyzing web content for broken links, slow loading pages, changing content, and Web site down time. HiSoftware Web Site Monitor allows for automated, scheduled and on demand monitoring of multiple web sites, for site quality and change management. NBII is utilizing HiSoftware’s Web Site Monitor to help developers and quality assurance professionals pinpoint and fix content, interaction, and usability defects. They are also using it to monitor their site content to ensure that unauthorized users do not access and change Web site content. NBII is in the process of implementing Hi-Stats from HiSoftware, which will be incorporated into Web Site Monitor to track visitors and site usage across NBII community sites. Hi-Stats will provide valuable information about how visitors are finding the NBII sites, how they are using our sites, and what types of information they are accessing. The current model will be that all NBII Regional and Thematic Nodes will run Hi-Stats to support Regional and Thematic Node statistics gathering, but also to allow users and stakeholders to see an overall view of NBII usage throughout the entire NBII network.

Finally, NBII needed effective tools to submit their site to Internet search engines and to analyze and increase traffic on their Web sites. NBII utilizes the <WebSite> Promotion Suite from HiSoftware Company to automatically submit new NBII and partner sites to the search engines. “Formerly we submitted sites manually, one at a time. With Hi-Visibility, we submit all of the sites once per month. This has been a tremendous time saver,” said Mr. Frame.

The Bottom Line

Today NBII is utilizing several Content Quality, Search and Site Management Solutions from HiSoftware Company to assist in managing the implementation and monitoring of Web policies across and increasingly complex and diverse set of NBII sites and partner sites. These solutions work together providing a scalable architecture that provides NBII with a faster deployment time and lower cost of ownership for the solution set. HiSoftware products provide a comprehensive interface for testing content against standards for Accessibility, searchability and any custom content quality factor, providing a unified approach that meets the demands of both NBII business and technical constituencies, by allowing their experts and/or policy managers to define content policies and then providing a solution to validate compliance with these policies.

“Prior to our implementation of HiSoftware’s solutions, NBII utilized staff members to audit the NBII sites and partner sites for conformance with our Web policies,” said Mike Frame “This was extremely labor intensive and time consuming, given the breadth and depth of these sites. Additionally, there was no efficient way to update these audits without expending additional resources, as Web content is dynamic by nature, and thus continually changing. Since the NBII is the Nation’s biological portal to biological data and information within the United States, it is important that we identify new and more effective means for the discovery, retrieval, and dissemination of our information. As technology changes, so will our approaches to solving this ever-growing and ongoing problem,” said Mr. Frame. As a recognized leader within the federal government related to metadata, accessibility, and web technologies, the NBII is continually on the lookout for new technologies, standards, and approaches that will make biological information more accessible on the World Wide Web to all users

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