[09.30.06 Update]
The system failure in class turned out to be very fortuitous. It allowed us to *debug* the system on the fly. It turns out an older version of the Lemur tool kit was being used. This caused the data source to be corrupted when two users tried to access the data at the same time. We managed to get a work arounf in place and ran, with some glitches, three great sessions with a total of about 30 federal agency officals. The result was that the tool (what we call Tool 2 in the demo) got an overwhelming endorsement, while Tool 3 was declared not ready for prime time. We did learn important things and we made mental breakthroughs about how Tool 3 would need to be altered (hint: think dynamic, user-seeded ontologies with mini language models for each search).
There is now a unified demo page for our tools.
[Original Post]
We are testing our eRulemaking tools with three groups of federal agency officials this Friday in Washington DC. I invite you to take a look at, and experiment with, these tools.
