grantBot

This application is provided as a service to the research community to aid in their search of government public sites publishing grant announcements, requests for proposals, details for funding opportunities, awards, fellowships, and contracting news (doing business with the government). The government publishes a body of laws encapsulated in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance. A special emphasis is placed on sites specifically aimed at small business "set-asides." Within this application are distinct links to targeted pages at 14 U.S. Departments and their Administrations, Agencies, Bureaus, Centers, Councils, Foundations, Institutes, Laboratories, Libraries, Offices, Programs, and Services offering Registries, Directories, Endowments, Scholarships, Fellowships, and the already mentioned Grants and Contracts.

grantBot is a text mining application that takes your query and searches the selected Departments to capture the pages that meet your criteria of interest. Your query is simply a logical expression of keywords that are sought in the individual pages, and each site that page links to in turn. This is a form of search engine that is already common on the Internet, but grantBot is targeted and contains a far more sophisticated inference engine. This application does not connect to those existing search engines, but instead goes to the pages of interest applying your query directly. Discussion of the query language can be found in related pages that offer this application.

grantBot contains controls to limit its searches as it will easily follow links deeply into Web Knowledge Space in an effort to satisfy your search through links offered at any site. An example of searching 5 web addresses for the U.S. Army alone could wander off into more than 900 linked pages. Given that grantBot contains approximately 200 targeted sites, their links could result in an explosion of searching to tens of thousands of pages if all Departments were selected for searching. With a 2 GHz machine loaded with 500 Megs of RAM, these first 900 pages would consume around 10 minutes of high-speed (T1) bandwidth.

Interested parties may feel free to contact the author at:

rwclark@cybernalysis.com

Please place the word grantBot alone in the subject line to reduce the chance of your mail being discarded by spam filters.

Questions will be answered as quickly as possible, but please attempt to consider the help screens offered first. Design support is limited to the nature of the inquiry and time available to accomplish implementation for the greater audience.