Use of Special Event Data in Government Information Systems

Special event data are descriptions of extraordinary events that are important to the management of an organization. Such data explain or predict pattern interruptions in the time series data of an organization's performance measures; hence, they are useful, and perhaps vital, for explanation, program evaluation, and forecasting. Due to the fiscal stress being experienced in government today, it is becoming critical to engage more in decision making over medium and long-term horizons instead of just reacting and muddling through on a day-to-day basis. Data-based analyses-explanation, program evaluation, and forecasting-are crucial here, and special event data are important for intelligent use of the underlying performance data. Unfortunately, however, organizations (public, private, and nonprofit) do not generally have the tradition of collecting, storing, sharing, and using special event data. This paper identifies this state of affairs as a problem and provides methods to help remedy it. Several examples of special event data are presented in the first part of this paper. Following that is a review of trends in computing that further increase the need to work with special event data. After that, the paper presents methods for representing special event data in shared databases and methods for collecting special event data. The final section concludes the paper

Business · Data science · Event (particle physics · Event data · Government (linguistics · Big Data and Business Intelligence · Cloud Computing and Resource Management · Computer Science · Philosophy · Software System Performance and Reliability