Minutes

1 Apologies

Apologies were received from Tony Rogers.

2 Review of Action Points from previous meeting

1 Working Group to develop guidance for agencies on when it is preferable to create multiple metadata records and when it is preferable to use a single record to describe several related resources (or forms of a resource). (Carried forward from the last meeting)

This guidance will be contained in the usage guide. The draft usage guide will be circulated in the near future

2 Sara Barham to organise a demonstration of Metalogue2 for the working group

Still to be organised! Sara will organise a time in the near future - to be carried forward as an action of this meeting

3 Sara Barham to put forward a framework for a joint meeting between the Working Group and SSC. The meeting will be scheduled in the next 3 - 4 weeks

Done

4 Working Group to give feedback on an element by element basis on how the Portal can make better use of NZGLS elements, feedback to be coordinated by Neil Sanson by end of June

Still to be completed - leave as an action item

5 Sara Barham to arrange a meeting with John Roberts, Keitha Booth and Emma Findlater of SSC in the next week (by 23 May)

Done

6 Sara Barham to ask Andrea Gray of SSC how far the E-government role extends in ensuring standards are adhered to or used beyond government sector

Still to be completed - leave as an action item

7 Sara Barham to set up meeting between Derek, Neil, Karen, John with Kent Duston of SSC and Douglas Campbell of the National Library to discuss use of NZGLS to describe metadata in a registry

Sara to talk to Kent about this and get back to the group

8 John Roberts to make edits to revised NZGLS specification version 2.1 as discussed and recirculate

Done

9 Neil Sanson to work on DocumentType and ServiceType encoding schemes with Keitha Booth. To be scheduled after the beginning of June

Done

10 Beryl Anderson to offer Thesaurus Advisory Group the chance to sort out the Audience encoding scheme

Done - and the proposed encoding scheme has been produced

11 Neil Sanson to work on formalising the Type category list as an encoding scheme

Under action

12 Derek Rayner to write a paper on the links and exclusions between the NZGLS and Geospatial metadata schema

Done

13 John Roberts to amend Terms of reference to reflect Deputy Chair role

Done

3 E-government Portal operations developments

Sara reported on progress since the meeting on "processes" on June 26. A workflow tool had been suggested to allow portal users to work through a process which involved multiple steps. Sara said that the process that was investigated as a prototype was "Ceasing a business". Ten to twelve separate steps were identified spanning across three agencies - IRD, ACC and the Companies Office. It was suggested that there could also be links to ERS. Looking at the separate steps it was noted that the level of granularity varied considerably between the agencies - IRD gives detailed instructions, ACC gives brief descriptions and then points to a website. Setting up a workflow process to take account of these differences was thought to be too difficult at this stage. The first step would seem to be trying to get better matching of service description between the agencies.

To progress this, Sara is going to get Trish O'Kane of SWIM to undertake some work on this, beginning at the end of October. Trish will work with agencies to get the component services to fit together better as coherent processes. Once that has been achieved the technical side will be looked at. Better communication between agencies involved in these sorts of processes will be one of the main focuses of this work. The processes suggested as being suitable for workflow are generally business focused, with other possibilities being in the housing, health and education areas.

Metalogue 2 is in production and receiving very good feedback. Currently there are some technical difficulties with data transfer from Metalogue to the Portal, but these are being worked on.

4 Work Programme

This was not discussed as a separate agenda item. John suggested that it would be adequately covered by other items on the agenda.

5 Specification version of NZGLS

Version 2.1 has been circulated for comment. It was agreed that this version could be released to Metalogue. Neil will send it to Chris Daish to be loaded on to the E-government website and then linked into Metalogue Online Help.

Comments on version 2.1 included:

- Gillian suggested that some date references for referenced standards need checking - she will send a list to Neil

- Karen said that she was going to circulate it within a group at the National Library for comment; Keitha asked Karen to ensure she was involved in that discussion

- Karen also asked whether Audience should be a 16th element or a term. John said it was an NZGLS element even though it was defined within the DC terms namespace.

The usage guide will shortly be circulated for comment; it has been updated from a variety of sources, including Australian, Canadian and UK government material.

Action: Neil will send the NZGLS Specification version 2.1 to Chris Daish at SSC to get processed to enable linking to Metalogue online help.

6 Encoding schemes

Audience

The existing encoding scheme for Audience has been looked reviewed by the Thesaurus Advisory Group and they have come up with a revised set of terms. To compile the terms they looked at four existing encoding schemes and decided which terms from each scheme were useful in the New Zealand government context as well as assessing what was missing from all of the overseas examples and needed to be included. If the list is acceptable Sara will initiate implementation of the revised Audience encoding scheme in Metalogue. There will also need to be guidance about using the Audience element and explanation about how it is different from the Subject element.

John asked why "Rural community" was singular whilst most of the others were plural. Beryl said it was referring to the whole body of the rural community not individual rural communities.

Neil asked why it was being referred to as a list rather than an encoding scheme and suggested that all such lists should be referred to as vocabularies.

Keitha suggested that the scope of the list needed to be established - portlets could need somewhat finer granularity for their audiences. The revised encoding scheme is optimised for use in the (whole of government) portal environment.

John asked about the level of obligation on the Audience element. Sara said that at least one term for audience had to be included. There was also some discussion about the necessity of having "All" as an Audience entry on all records, which was necessary for searching under Metalogue 1. Sara said she would investigate if this was still a requirement

Action: Sara to look at the implementation of the revised NZGLS audience encoding scheme into Metalogue 2.

Action: The TAG group will maintain the NZGLS Audience encoding scheme

Action: Neil to edit the document produced by TAG and use it in the instructions for Audience in the Usage Guide

Action: Sara to check the search logic in the portal to see if we still need an "All" entry in the Audience element for all records

Type element
John introduced discussion on the Type element by asking if the current Agency / Service / Document breakdown provided enough categories. There being no immediate answer the group started by considering the Agency type

Agency type

It was suggested that Agency could not be split into smaller sections as the categorisation of agencies changes regularly and would cause a lot of re-work.

At present when an agency changes name or category the Agency record has to change, but the agency's service and document records do not have to change

There were suggestions that the categories for agencies could be sub-divided. This would be more useful for internal users, however in general it was felt that the public probably don't care what type of agency they are searching for, they just want to find the correct agency to deal with. Neil provided a draft document with a breakdown on agency type - there were questions about the Hospitals classification as public institutions compared with DHBs' classification as Territorial authorities. It was agreed that the two should be in the same category as hospitals are part of DHBs. Karen said that the National Library also had a classification of agencies as part of its authority file work. It was agreed that Karen would circulate the National Library document to the working group.

Action: Karen to circulate the National Library document on agency classification to the working group

Action: Janine to arrange to talk the Library about its use of authority files for classification of agencies

EGU are exploring using Archives' GLADIS agency records for the portal, but Archives usage has a different focus from the one that the portal will require. Matching the exported GLADIS records to the needs of the portal is currently in progress.

Service type

Derek asked if service type is useful or is function better? Sara wants to pursue function at some stage. Type may be useful within government - but again the public won't usually use it. There was discussion about the different possible categorisations of services.

There was some doubt about the usefulness of 'life event' types. It was felt that the age bands were not relevant. It was suggested that Audience would be a better place for recording this information.

After further discussion it was agreed that there is currently no need for the service type but it may be needed when the portal has gained maturity

Action: Put the Service type on hold - re-examine it at the May 2004 meeting

Action: John to talk to Kaylene Murdoch about the service type as part of the Architectural Review

Sara was asked if the EGU looked at search logs to understand trends in the public search behaviour. Sara said this was not undertaken at the moment. It was suggested that this would be a good idea and that feedback could be given to the group on the results of such investigations. Areas for investigation might be changes in search patterns over time, analysis of how people move through the web site, and if searches lead to results or if they are abandoned.

Document type

What is there has evolved rather than being deliberately established. It has drawbacks - statues and buildings are not documents but documentType is the only way of describing them. Document may needs other divisions; the system works at the moment because there are only 6000 records, when there are ten times that number there will probably need to be alternatives in the document type. At present the public generally search by subject and this gives adequate granularity.

It was suggested that there might be more top-level terms eg text, image etc, but it was pointed out that Type is not Format, so care is needed. Another suggestion was that it could be classified on the role of the document, such as minutes, presentation, correspondence, to avoid confusion with format.

The Canadians and the UK have produced classification lists; the Canadian one is probably the more exhaustive. However, as it runs to four pages, its use could be resisted.

Whether there is a need for this may become clearer when the process / workflow work is explored. It was also suggested that those attending the conference should try and gauge whether other groups were finding a need to subdivide documents.

Action: Revise the top tier (Agency/Document/Service categorisation) - split document into two or three terms

Action: Look at the Canadian and UK second tier lists and agree on a list of important terms

7 LINZ Geospatial Metadata Standards Project

Derek circulated a report from the LINZ Geospatial Metadata project. He has asked for more detail and will circulate it when he receives it.

The Geospatial Metadata standard that they are proposing is consistent with the ISO 19115 standard. The data will need to be extracted and mapped to the portal needs. There are a large number of mandatory elements but there are similarities with NZGLS.

The mapping will need to be tailored to the NZGLS at the time the link to the portal is implemented.

It was suggested that at the moment NZGLS should just wait and see what happens and look for opportunities to get involved.

Action: Derek to circulate the more detailed report on Geospatial Metadata when he receives it

8 Accessibility

There was discussion about accessibility and where it should be recorded. This was particularly in relation to accessibility for people with disabilities. It was suggested information about accessibility should be recorded under Availability or maybe in Audience.

It was also suggested that the qualifier ConformsTo could be used in this context, to allow the metadata to record that a resource conforms to a specified accessibility standard, such as the W3C guidelines. Accessibility requirements are also part of the web guidelines. It was generally agreed that this qualifier would be useful but ensuring it was used correctly could be tricky: how do we ensure that the resource genuinely does conform to any standards it purports to follow? It was suggested that the EGU would have to decide on a process for ensuring conformity. Sara said Mark Harris of the EGU would need to be alerted in terms of the relationship to the Web guidelines.

9 Qualifiers - conformsTo and dateCopyrighted

The conformsTo qualifier was discussed as part of accessibility and generally agreed to be appropriate for inclusion in the NZGLS standard. This qualifier is already a DC refinement for Relation.

Action: conformsTo - to be adopted in the next version of the NZGLS Element Set

The dateCopyrighted qualifier is used in DC to represent copyright date information as a refinement of Date. In NZGLS this is currently covered in a different way in the Rights element. It was agreed that there are no compelling reasons for changing to the qualifier from the present method. It was suggested that we should watch the DC / international arena and see what develops out there.

10 DC conference

The group were asked to let John know if there was anything they wanted him to say at the DC conference. His presentation topic is Metadata Quality, and he is meeting with the Metalogue central QA for their input.

Beryl asked for information about thesauri in Canada where there are different schemes produced by Government of Canada and Statistics Canada. She asked how the two schemes managed to co-exist.

11 Future meeting dates

Dates were set for meetings for the next year:

Wednesday 11 February 2004

Wednesday 12 May 2004

Wednesday 4 August 2004

12 Other business

Karen has links to European use of metadata, which she offered to pass on to the group

Action: Karen to send the links on European use of metadata to the working group.

Meeting concluded 12.45

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