A mobile application developed by an Institute for Simulation & Training (IST) lab stands at number five in a recent Information Week review of the 10 coolest government applications developed for the iPad.
A team led by IST researcher, David Rogers, who also heads his own start-up and UCF Business Incubation Program company, Allogy Interactive, designed the Federal Register application with input from the White House and the Government Printing Office.
The Federal Register app is one of only a couple of dozen government-developed iPad applications, although that number is likely to grow rapidly as more government agencies buy in to the new mobile technology.
Many lawmakers, looking for ways to cut back federal spending, have adopted the iPad as a replacement for the mountains of paper that typically grow during the day’s business. Officials predict that as the number of apps increases, document paper and printing costs will go down.
One of the costliest of these documents, the Federal Register, began publishing in 1935 as a daily official journal of record for the U.S. government. The document has grown to more than 80,000 pages annually. Although available online since 1994, the Register only became searchable online in 2009. The IST/Allogy Interactive mobile iPad app raises the document’s accessibility to a new level.