Compliance study

NZGLS metadata schema compliance study

The State Services Commission and the National Library of New Zealand have jointly funded a pilot study to identify the costs and issues involved in extending existing Dublin Core metatags in a website to make them NZGLS-compliant.

The report provides useful information for the further development of NZGLS, and supporting tools. In general, the intention of NZGLS is to be Dublin Core compliant. The report identifies some areas of inconsistency between Dublin Core and NZGLS, which will be examined. It is envisaged that some of the inconsistencies can be readily addressed without significant impact on agencies.

The report also notes the need for consistent names for encoding schemes, both within the NZGLS implementation community and more broadly in discovery metadata. A registry of schemes will be established to provide an authoritative list of names and reference to other information about such schemes.

The complexity of the NZGLS documentation is also noted. More concise documentation will be developed, which is expected to be particularly valuable as users become familiar with the broad structure of NZGLS.

Development of a tool tailored to NZGLS and its preferred encoding schemes will aid agencies in the application of the standard, and will help address some of the issues.

Any further comments on the implementation of NZGLS, or analysis of its relation to agency information environments are welcome.