5. E-government Unit update

New structure

E-government director Laurence Millar has now had a chance to put some new structures in place. There has been a significant re-allocation within the unit with Edwin Bruce now managing both delivery and operations. The EGU Infrastructure section (Ferry Hendrikx and Martyn Smith) now looks after more than the portal and is responsible for managing the all-of-government infrastructure. Sara's new role as Portal Services Manager extends what she was previously doing.

David Barrow is continuing with the Linked Services project and the Unit is looking at prototyping some services. A QA Review has also started which is taking each agency's metadata and looking at it as a whole as well as record by record.

Shared Workspace

Shared Workspace is a number of applications, which allow people from different agencies to securely share their work. It now has a thousand users and demand is growing.

John asked if they used NZGLS for their document profiles.

Action: Victoria to check with Ros Coote whether shared workspace uses NZGLS for their document profiles.

Trudy advised that if anyone had further questions they should contact Ros Coote.

Directory Project

The Directory Project is an attempt to provide an authoritative set of information about government agencies e.g. name, type. The project has been working with the information from Metalogue, Gladis (Archives), Machinery of Government (SSC), and Directory of Official Information (MoJ). They may involve the Blue Pages (DIA) in the future. Data is currently being harmonised and SLAs are being developed to ensure it is well maintained over time.

The Directory schema is based on LDAP (Lightweight Directory Application Protocol) and has been harmonised with NZGLS.

e-Gif

E-Gif is the e-Government interoperability framework. It is a number of standards to assist agencies with such things as data exchange, business process reuse, etc

Some of the strands of work include: -

• CVLs (controlled value lists)
• xNAL (name/address standard)

The OASIS standards community has developed xNAL and e-GIF is giving it a New Zealand flavour. Michael Brownie expressed interest in finding out more about the xNAL project.

Action: Trudy to invite Michael to the next xNAL (business processes) workshop.

Education Field

The E-learning group is working on an educational metadata standard to be used to describe learning objects, while the Federated Search project is working on building a hub which allows searches across multiple databases. Keitha noted that Matapihi (www.matapihi.org.nz/) also searches across a number of databases (e.g. National Library, Otago Museum etc).

Authentication

The authentication team is growing. There are three strands to this work, one of which is the shared keys trial. If anyone is interested in this area, contact Gavin Valentine.

Policy

Janet Chambers has been working on trusted computing, which has implications for long-term retention and access to documents.

The 'Channel Surfing Strategy' report on how people access government has been completed by Auckland University and is due for release. www.e-government.govt.nz/docs/channel-surfing-200409/

Tracy asked John if agencies were using NZGLS in non-Metalogue environments. John said that there was some NZGLS in metatags on websites but it may be obsolete. Keitha wondered that this might change as the web guidelines become compulsory.

Action: John to check what statements the Web Guidelines make about the deployment of NZGLS metadata

Sarah asked whether there is an XML schema for NZGLS. John noted that DC and AGLS have schema which could be used for most of NZGLS, but that no separate NZGLS schema has, as yet, been developed. Keitha said that Douglas Campbell of the National Library has a lot of expertise in this area.