Issue date: 8/1/05 Section: News

Ravi Garach - The Battalion. Senior political science major Allison McFarland and Rural and Public Health graduate student Jan McCallum review a layout of the integrated center for homeland security´s taxonomy. The Taxonomy is an online research database for various aspects of homeland security.

Not all work done for Homeland Security takes place in top-secret locations with high-level security clearances. Two Texas A&M students working at the University's Integrative Center for Homeland Security are helping to develop TEX, the Homeland Security Taxonomy for Education and Exploration.

Jan McCallum, a graduate student in the College of Rural and Public Health, and Allison McFarland, a senior political science major, scour the Internet for homeland security-related documents and load them into TEX, an online database that brings together information released by Congress, the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) and many other sources.

According to the TEX Web site, TEX was created because, "the serious study of Homeland Security is hampered by the lack of formal structure to provide content and connectivity between issues. This taxonomy is offered to fill this need. It will be continually expanded and revised by the students and faculty of TAMU."

McCallum said the information on TEX ranges from simple newspaper reports about the vulnerability of our nation's nuclear power plants to complex strategy analysis of how to determine the credibility of threats and intelligence. McCallum said that having the TEX database allows students and others who are searching for specific information about Homeland Security issues to go from spending hours of time browsing through thousands of articles and files to searching the database in a fraction of that time.

McCallum said she sees the database as a way to help inform the public about complex issues concerning homeland security.

"There was a big gap in homeland security research; there are a lot of reports on the Web by the DHS and others, but there wasn't a database to bring all of the information to one place," McCallum said. "TEX is also a way to help students get all their information in one place. Students might have just been searching for 'homeland security' on Google and going through 8,000 hits. We've broken it down by subject and made finding what you want much easier."

McCallum said the project isn't bound by any kind of timetable.

"We're going to continually update (TEX) as long as there is a gap that we need to fill," McCallum said.

McFarland said she works alongside McCallum to bring together documents for TEX.

"There are hundreds of documents and Web pages out there, and we're just trying to put it all together to help summarize all the data," McFarland said. "We track down the information, and then we break it down by subject or taxonomy, to make specific things easier to find."

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