< Previous | Contents | Next >
4. Government Standards and Metadata
As part of its Government Online initiative, the Federal Government "requires Commonwealth departments and agencies to comply with some minimum online requirements and standards to ensure a basic level of consistency and quality of service across Commonwealth websites."
The specific standards and requirements are available at the link given below. One of the most important of these is the Australian Government Locator Service metadata standard. This is a series of metadata tags that contain information describing the contents in a document, organisational and author data, based upon the Dublin Core standards.
The purpose of the metadata is to allow centralised searching and navigating of data. The intention is for the government to set up a central science page through which a user could request information from all government scientific organisations, such as the CSIRO, ANSTO and AUSLIG to match a particular query.
An example of this metadata is available by selecting the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation from the drop down menu at
http://www.access.gov.au/agency_gen_meta/generate_metadata.cfm
Software is available to automatically analyse document content and generate metadata with varying levels of success. A number of the metadata tags are standard throughout an organisation, so we can place these in a template. The author should add others at when creating a document.
The ATNF is a Commonwealth institution and we should implement metadata standards in our website. The definition and use of metadata is a subject that will require further investigation and discussion in future.
For further information on the Government Online initiative please see: