That name was very familiar to me. A couple years ago when I was working with CNPP on the 2010 Dietary Guidelines, that was one of the products we had considered in the cobbled-together solution that EPA was advocating. That product would assist with the analysis portion of the process.
What PCAT does is grab the data from FDMS and then crawl it. It will create a Wordle type of output but more importantly it will help by creating a list of categories. Even better though, you can specify your own list of categories and then quickly tag comments to relate them to one or more categories. Finally, it is entirely cloud-based. It is essentially Software as a Service, so there is no hardware or applications to install or maintain.
The product certainly has matured in the last 2 years. Mr. Schulman explained how the application was created. It was really funded through some research grants from the National Science Foundation. It was conceived as an approach to dealing with unstructured data. Is it perfect? No. But I have to admit, it seems like it has really been a 1-man show so far. It would be interesting to see what could be accomplished with a small development team and about 4 months. I suspect that it could have a much more focused benefit.
Anyway, that was pretty good new to help address the analysis portion of the work. We have an enterprise license that will carry us through March, and that will likely be what we need to address the immediate concern. Long-term, I still think that EPA through their Regulations.gov/FDMS have a responsibility to nullify the need for applications like PCAT by making their solutions better, but until that day comes...
The other issue, the data load issue, getting the content from the box that the mail room provides into FDMS had some movement as well. We could pay another Agency in the Department somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 cents per page and they will load the content for us.
No comments:
Post a Comment