Supporting federal agency field operations

Federal agencies support a wide array of different types of field operations. There is a growing trend amongst such agencies to try to increase the efficiency of the field operations by putting a hand held computer into the hands of their field staff. To make this feasible it is necessary to connect the field staff to the agency's headquarters and especially to the agency's data archives. A model of an infrastructure that receives requests from members of the field staff and acts on the requests is presented and the current prototype of the model is briefly discussed.