Govt Internet Access Architecture Workshop

[Tony Boston <tony@erin.gov.au>]

This may be of intertest to some ozmeta-l subscribers...

Regards,

Tony Boston
ERIN
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>From tony@erin.gov.au Thu Sep 26 10:04 EST 1996
From: Tony Boston <tony@erin.gov.au>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 10:04:45 +1000
To: erin@erin.gov.au, webtech@erin.gov.au, tony@erin.gov.au
Subject: Govt Internet Access Architecture Workshop
Cc: mwardrop@dest.gov.au, andrew.campbell@dest.gov.au
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On Monday and Tuesday this week I attended a workshop on access to government 
information via the Internet and specifically on technologies to improve 
search/ browse access to that information. The workshop was held at the National
Library and sponsored by the Office of Government IT and the Information 
Management Steering Committee (IMSC). For more info on the workshop objectives 
see:

http://www.adfa.oz.au/DOD/imsc/imsctg/workshop/

Attendees included people from State and Commonwealth government, CSIRO,
Universities and Industry.

The outcomes of the workshop will be posted on the Net soon. In the meantime
here is my own brief potted summary:

1. The group recommended that in the short term a centralised government
   index should be set up. This would be like an "AltaVista" or "Lycos" of 
   all government web sites. This index would reside at the Government
   entry point web site which would have the address http://www.gov.au.

2. It was recognised that in the longer term a "metaindex" is needed to
   provide a higher level view of government functions and services. Altavista-
   type searches will ultimately fail to meet user requirements as they provide
   too much and too detailed information for the average user. Before the
   metaindex can be built metadata is needed on web sites, web services, 
   databases and collections. It was proposed that the US Government Information
   Locator Service (GILS) metadata "standard" be used as the basis for an
   Australian GILS (AusGILS) standard. There was some discussion of an
   implementation model, it was proposed that each web site would have
   a /gils directory under its document root into which would be placed
   SGML files which described their services/functions/collections/databases.
   A gathering process (web crawler) would visit each registered gov. site 
   regularly to build and update a metaindex which would live at
   http://www.gov.au. The provision of this level of metadata would be
   mandatory for government web sites.

3. Metadata was also recognised as important for documents. The provision of
   metadata for documents would be optional. The group recognised that there 
   are different levels of metadata which may vary between agencies but a 
   minimal/ core set should be defined if possible (the ANZLIC approach). A
   good candidate for the this set is the "Dublin core" metadata at:

   http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core

   Beyond the core metadata set would be agency/function/subject specific
   metadata. It was proposed to use META tags in the HEAD section of HTML 
   documents to record document metadata in the short term. This would conform
   to the container architecture defined at the Warwick Metadata workshop
   in April this year, which allows for many different sets of metadata which
   pertain to different subject areas or types of information, see:

   http://www.uic.edu/~cmsmcq/tech/metadata.syntax.html

   In the longer term it may be possible to use a database for document 
   metadata in conjunction with the Uniform Resource Name proposal to provide 
   more persistent identifiers and metadata for web resources, see:

   http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/uri/

   It was recognised that agencies would maintain their own indexes to their
   documents and that these would be either free text indexes, fielded indexes
   or a combination. Standard search and retrieval interfaces were also 
   discussed, and conformamce to "standards" such as STARTS and Z39.50, 
   for more info see:

   http://www-db.stanford.edu/~gravano/starts_home.html
   http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/

There will be an official version of workshop recommendations coming out soon.

Cheers,

Tony

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>From cirg-l@nla.gov.au Tue Sep 24 09:25 EST 1996
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 1996 09:24:43 +1000
Reply-To: cirg-l@nla.gov.au
Originator: cirg-l@nla.gov.au
Sender: cirg-l@nla.gov.au
From: ian.barndt@ogit.gov.au
To: tony@erin.gov.au
Subject: FW: Government Access Architecture Workshop (Australia)
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>----------
>From: 	tomw@acslink.net.au[SMTP:tomw@acslink.net.au]
>Sent: 	Monday, 23 September 1996 13:44
>To: 	link@charlotte.anu.edu.au
>Subject: 	Government Access Architecture Workshop (Australia)
>
>A position paper and other materials from the Government Access
>Architecture
>Workshop at the National Library of Australia 23-24/9/96, are available
>at:
>http://www.adfa.oz.au/DOD/imsc/imsctg/workshop/
>
>Further material will be available tomorrow (day 2) and following the
>workshop.
>
>
>Tom Worthington <tomw@acslink.net.au> President, Australian Computer
>Society, GPO Box 446, Canberra ACT 2601
>http://www.acslink.net.au/~tomw,
>Fax: +61 6 2496419
>--------------------------------------------------------------------
>Visit to ACS Tasmanian Branch by President, 15-17 September 1996:
>http://www.acs.org.au/president/1996/visits/tasmania/tasmania.htm
>--------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>


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