Vets get access to services through new portal

Veterans can now use a new portal to locate products and services in their communities, according to the developers of Warrior Gateway.

Taking a cue from websites such as Google and consumer-fed sites such as Yelp, Warrior Gateway harnesses capabilities in search, consumer voice and expertise and puts them together so veterans can access services where they live, said Devin Holmes, Warrior Gateway's executive director. Holmes spoke at the MarkLogic Government Summit on Nov. 17.

The site's developers said Warrior Gateway tackles information fragmentation to bring together data and resources that are spread across databases and websites and work in concert to get the information where it needs to be, when it needs to be there, for the person who needs it.

Warrior Gateway seeks to aggregate all the relevant information and resources into a central portal that veterans can use to more easily find what they need. Users can also access the information through Warrior Gateway's partner sites, such as Challenge America, Holmes said.

“We don’t want to hold any information hostage,” said Rob Stoltz, senior technologist at Customer Value Partners, which is collaborating on the Warrior Gateway project. "We don’t want to be another stovepipe in this information world. We want to push the information out and power the community."

Warrior Gateway is using emergent collaboration — specifically, the SLATES approach, or search, links, authoring, tagging, extensions and signals, said Stoltz, who also spoke at the MarkLogic summit.

The goal of SLATES is to provide access to information (search); enable better browsing (links); present relevant content through various resources, including blogs and wikis (authoring); take advantage of user-generated classification systems (tagging); direct users to content they might find valuable, based on their history (extensions); and help users find new content and information as it becomes available, such as through RSS feeds (signals).

Through that approach, projects such as Warrior Gateway can take advantage of social media and crowdsourcing to help veterans more easily access important information, Holmes said.

The MarkLogic Government Summit was presented by 1105 Government Information Group, the parent company of Federal Computer Week.