GovernmentDocs.org Offers Major Advancement in the Effort to Engender an Open and Accountable Government

Vienna, VA – November 12, 2007 – ZyLAB, an innovative developer of Information Access Solutions, today announced that it is providing search and retrieval capabilities for GovernmentDocs.org (http://www.governmentdocs.org), a new online community document review system. GovernmentDocs.org gives the public an unprecedented level of access to government documents by allowing users to browse, search, and review hundreds of thousands of pages acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other public disclosure, or “sunshine,” laws.

GovernmentDocs.org harnesses the interactivity and immediacy of the Web and leverages the time and resources organizations have devoted in obtaining documents. Using the system citizen reviewers can engage in the government accountability process like never before. The goal of the database is to create a central repository of government documents, promoting greater transparency into the inner-workings of our government.

Traditionally, government watchdog groups have either posted FOIA documents on their websites as unsearchable PDFs, or statically highlighted several pages within a document to bolster their findings. This has historically limited the public's access to FOIA documents, and minimizes the opportunities for use by researchers, journalists and citizen reviewers for further research and disclosures. Governmentdocs.org changes that:

• Each and every document goes through an optical character recognition (OCR) process, so that the text of each document is entirely searchable.
• A powerful search engine provides full-text searches and hit highlighting.
• Citizen reviewers can add information to each document page and highlight important findings, allowing for more robust and targeted searches.
• Every page of every document has its own unique URL so that documents can be linked, shared, or posted onto websites.
• The database is a coalition effort, so all of the organizations' documents will be housed on governmentdocs.org and searches will work across collections.

The contributing partners at launch are Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW); Project On Government Oversight (POGO); Public Citizen; Sunlight Foundation; and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Registered users can review and comment on documents, adding their insights and expertise to the work of the national nonprofit organizations which are partnering on this project.

“ZyLAB is very proud to have contributed to this new online document review system for the public,” said Johannes C. Scholtes, President of ZyLAB North America LLC. “Much like Wikipedia, this installation is really at the heart of what Web 2.0 is all about. With this visionary installation, anyone can assist GovernmentDocs.org in providing a layer of structured information on top of this enormous amount of unstructured data. We predict that this project will proceed much faster than anticipated, as the public's desire for transparent government cannot be underestimated”.

About ZyLAB
For 25 years, ZyLAB has provided commercial and government organizations around the world with award-winning information access solutions. The ZyIMAGE Information Access Platform is a complete XML-based system that provides a secure foundation for the long-term archiving, management and retrieval of information, from digitized paper documents, to electronic files, to e-mail and attachments, to multimedia.

With over 7,500 installations and 350,000 users worldwide, ZyLAB has a wealth of experience and knowledge across a variety of industries and business applications. Federal clients include the Executive Office of the President and the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Justice and Defense, as well as all branches of the US Armed Forces and investigative teams at the FBI, SEC, and Amtrak's OIG. Hundreds of state and local governments also rely on ZyLAB, such as The State of California, Montgomery County, Maryland, and The Town of Jackson, Wyoming. ZyLAB's numerous commercial clients include leading companies like American Express, Anheuser-Busch, Dominion Virginia Power, Lockheed Martin, Pacific Life, and Shell Oil. For more information visit: www.zylab.com