Microsoft sorts out government sites, sounds

Two projects recently revealed by Microsoft are helping government officials figure out which way is up and what was said about it.

At GEOINT 2008 this week, Microsoft unveiled its Single View Platform (SVP), which allows entities such as government agencies and NGOs like the United Nations to pull together complex information and databases and view them geographically, even if the locations and user interfaces to the data vary. This is handy if you're attempting to coordinate relief efforts across a large swath of territory, or if you're working up emergency-response plans or other services that help your citizens, wherever they may be located.

At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, for instance, they're using the tools plus Virtual Earth and Microsoft Office SharePoint to get a handle on the ordering process for chemical supplies across the campus. That in turn helps to support a Department of Energy project to increase the availability of clean and abundant energy.

The UN's International Telecommunications Union is getting a better look at telecommunications infrastructure worldwide thanks to a joint project between Microsoft and IDV Solutions. ITU Global View is an online mapping application that helps make clear how the goals of the World Summit on the Information Society, underway these five years, are coming along. The application lets viewers see not only the current infrastructure but statistics, trends, and projects in development around the world.

Closer to home, the state of Washington announced Thursday that Microsoft Research has been lending a hand to the state's Digital Archives, which had a pile of cassette recordings of House of Representatives committee meetings and no easy way to make them searchable online. Washington has been quite aggressive about preserving and making available its public recordings before the cassettes in question are too decrepit to be of use, but the prospect of transcribing thousands and thousands of hours of cassette recording was a little daunting (and very expensive).

Audio indexing is something they've been looking into for a while at Microsoft Research, so the state asked the Redmond company for help with their portion of the state's archives, the first of its kind in the nation.

The database so far can be tested on the state's Web site. So far the project has made available about 6,000 hours of committee meetings recorded between 1973 and 2001, and expects to tackle about 10,000 hours of audio over the next two years.