Email	Print Reprint
	add to:
	Del.icio.us Digg Google Furl	Slashdot Y! MyWeb Blink

Suppose you wanted to search online for information on recreational opportunities in America's parks. Where would you start?

In the past, you would have had to familiarize yourself with governmental structure and the individual missions of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service, and the National Park Service—not to mention the Web site for each. Today, you can find information from all of these agencies at Recreation.gov, an easy-to-use Web site where visitors access information on federal lands, recreation-use permits, and how to make reservations.

Navigating the Parks

Faced with the challenge of integrating multiple sites, the architects of Recreation.gov focused on creating a standard interface, one that is navigable by site users with only basic computing skills. The individual Web sites for each agency still vary in design, but the parks have standard listings on Recreation.gov that make it easier for users to conduct searches.

"Customers told us they appreciated how much information we had," says Charlie Grymes, project manager for the Department of the Interior's Recreation One-Stop initiative. "Our biggest challenge was people having difficulty navigating between [Web] sites." Before Recreation.gov, Grymes explains, "It was like finding a needle in a haystack."

Steve Pittleman, National Park Service Webmaster in Washington, D.C., agrees. "We all have our own missions," he says of the various agencies participating in Recreation.gov. For example, few people know that the Army Corps of Engineers' 458 recreational areas are mostly dams and lakes east of the Mississippi, while the Bureau of Reclamation manages mostly land west of the Mississippi.

With Recreation.gov, they don't need to know. Site visitors can search not only by state or by individual bureau or service, but also by the type of activity they want to engage in, such as rock climbing.

The next generation of the site will give visitors expanded thematic search capabilities. For example, users will be able to narrow their searches to include only Civil War parks with volcanoes that offer bicycling. The Recreation.gov team is also looking at presenting "special needs" information about park accessibility and programs.

Easy Administration

After months of meetings, the founding agencies agreed that each park's listing on the site should include a brief description, a photo, a list of park activities, a telephone and email list for the park, and a link to its Web site (if applicable). "The descriptions of the parks usually don't change. What may change are the area codes for [park] phone numbers, or email addresses," says Keith Stewart, a Web application developer at the Interior Department's National Business Center (NBC).

One or two program managers in each agency are given administrative access to the system. These "data stewards" log in with a user name and password to update the central database remotely. Each can update only his or her own agency's data.

As important as it was to develop a user-friendly interface for Recreation.gov visitors, creating an effective UI for site administrators that wouldn't require extensive training was equally critical. "We have a tremendous turnover in staff," Pittleman explains, adding that few people in the field have HTML coding skills.

To address these problems, the National Park Service has been moving away from using static HTML pages on its own site (www.nps.gov), in favor of a dynamic, menu-driven system.

Flexible Middleware

Recreation.gov is served from the Microsoft IIS Web server backed by a Microsoft SQL Server database. Stewart credits much of the site's success to its use of Macromedia ColdFusion 4.5 Server as a middleware product, which the site's designers chose over Microsoft ASP and other similar offerings.

"It's easier to integrate [ColdFusion] with different products," Stewart says. ColdFusion includes support for Microsoft Access and SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2, Informix, and applications that run on the Linux, Windows NT, and Unix operating systems. This made it an ideal choice for integrating the various infrastructures of the agencies participating in the project. ColdFusion can also support wireless applications; NBC officials hope to soon extend Recreation.gov to provide limited site data to mobile phone, Palm OS, and Pocket PC users.

Data is automatically synchronized between the NBC application server and the agencies' respective databases. "It looks at the last changes done and the time stamp on our system," says Stewart. If there have been any changes to the agencies' data since the last update, Recreation.gov automatically imports the new information.

"The challenge is working out the data standards," Grymes says. In one instance, Recreation.gov's architects used XML for data exchange with another site, while in another they used Excel spreadsheets. Here again, Recreation.gov benefited from ColdFusion's flexibility because the server supported the variety of data file formats used by the participating agencies. "In both cases, we were able to import the data in one day," he says. Still, NBC officials are considering wider use of the XML format to improve communications between the partner agencies.

Budget Concerns

One of the greatest challenges Recreation.gov faced has been the budget. National Park Service backers have argued before Congress that the service is underfunded at a time when the public's use of parklands is increasing. "I think that we all have some experience with lack of funds to go forward with our [information technology] plans," Pittleman says.

In the case of Recreation.gov, compromises had to be struck to meet spending goals. Annual maintenance costs for the site are low because Recreation.gov uses commercial, off-the-self software, rather than a custom-built solution. "We didn't invent a whole lot. We didn't try to become a technology marvel," says Grymes. The participating agencies split the $55,000 annual cost (about $150 a day) for system maintenance and updates.

The initial hardware costs were underwritten by Hewlett-Packard, which donated a NetServer—worth approximately $35,000—to host the site.

However, when NBC took over management of the site in 1999, it moved the applications to a new server. NBC officials, who serve as the project support group for Recreation.gov, struck a standard hosting agreement with Minerva Network Systems of Chantilly, Virginia. The HP NetServer continues as a backup host. Overall, Stewart says, the hosting arrangement has worked well, with no site outages reported since Recreation.gov's early days.

Getting the Word Out

Eager to spread the word about their site, Recreation.gov's managers have hustled to get listed in search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

According to Stewart, program managers have used a statistical tracking module to find out which sources are referring users to the site. "We've gotten a lot of customers from the Microsoft search engine," Grymes says.

Since its launch, Recreation.gov has grown to attract as many as 30,000 unique site visits each day during its peak spring and summer season, according to Stewart. Earlier this year, Bush Administration officials named Recreation.gov as one of the top twenty-five e-government initiatives.

Drawn by the site's success, the State of Virginia and Fairfax County, Virginia, have both added their own recreational areas to Recreation.gov in recent months. The Tennessee Valley Authority has also jumped on the bandwagon, and site developers are now adding Maryland's and New Jersey's recreational lands as well. Stewart says Recreation.gov would like to add even more state and county data.

But there's still plenty of room for improvement. On March 7, the NBC sponsored a four-hour forum in Washington, D.C. More than 200 people attended the meeting, including park rangers, federal workers, technology executives, and system users, all bringing requests for improvements they'd like to see. "It was a very good meeting for us to learn what people are using the site for and how we could improve it," Stewart says.

Geospatial Mapping

One popular suggestion was for the site to allow visitors to view maps that could let them see the topography of the land, where local rivers intersect with the park they're considering visiting, and where county boundaries are. "We're exploring the likelihood of providing that," Grymes says, while adding that data storage and processor power will both present problems.

"Spatial images are a lot bigger than text files," he says. "Creating maps on the fly can take a lot of time and require larger servers."

One solution being considered is a cooperative agreement with Microsoft's TerraServer as a source for scanned maps, which could be matched to longitude and latitude coordinates through a mapping engine.

"We have the addresses for all the [recreation] sites," Stewart says. The Web site would be linked to the U.S. Geological Survey national atlas, so Recreation.gov wouldn't need to store all the mapping data. Recreation.gov architects have written an application to find out which images don't have latitude or longitude coordinates to accompany photos.

Going Forward

NBC officials have also invited companies, including Hewlett-Packard, to submit ideas for Recreation.gov. Among the concerns they would like to address is how to improve the site's online reservation system.

HP wants to supply handheld units that park site visitors could use to download data, with the option to print on HP printers. "If the information is ready, [we need to] make it ready how they need it, when they need it," says Patrice D'Eramo, director of federal government marketing for HP.

Stewart is considering still further improvements, including the possibility of selling park passes online.

All in all, Recreation.gov shows what government workers can do when they bypass agency boundaries and work to serve citizens using technology. In this respect, the small team of Recreation.gov developers has proven that government doesn't have to be big to be effective.

---

William is a freelance writer based in Rockville, Maryland, and has been covering information technologies for the past seven years. Email him at wamurray@familink.com.

RELATED ARTICLES Parallel LINQ LG Announces Netflix-enabled Broadband HDTVs Getting Started with TBB on Windows A Forth HTML Generator Dynamic Storyboards and Animations in Silverlight 2		TOP 5 ARTICLES No Top Articles.