Collaboration in Addressing National Issues - The University of Belize's Collaboration in Transnational Digital Government Research

Charles McSweeney
University of Belize

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     Last modified: July 27, 2006
     Presentation date: 11/03/2006 10:00 AM in NT Ortanique
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Abstract
Collaboration among governments is essential to solving national, regional and global issues. This collaboration is achievable through transnational digital government (TDG) using information technology (IT) to overcome national differences and to facilitate information collection and exchange.

Paramount to any research project on TDG is the formation of sound government-academia partnerships. This paper illustrates such a partnership in the context of a unique project aimed at strengthening the security of nations by utilizing technology to effectively address the real-time exchange of critical information among government agencies with regard to suspicious drug related individuals who cross international borders.

This TDG Research Project is piloted for the OAS and is sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF).

The collaborative partnership involved in this project consists of a team of researchers from seven universities and several ministries and agencies in three countries (US, Dominican Republic and Belize). The proposed system, integrates a distributed query processor, a language translation system, an event server, and an event-trigger-rule server. The Web-services infrastructure is used to achieve the interoperation of these heterogeneous component systems.