FOREWORD

The New Zealand Government Locator Service (NZGLS) Metadata Element Set provides a set of metadata elements designed to improve the discovery, visibility, accessibility and interoperability of online information and services.

The set was determined by a working group at a series of meetings held during 1998-2001.

The development objective of the NZGLS working group was to define a set of metadata elements that would improve the discovery of New Zealand government information and services. The elements would be accessible through standard web-based resource descriptions that would enable users to locate the information or service that they require.

Relationship to Dublin Core

The NZGLS element set described here comprises 19 descriptors that resulted from the working group meetings in 1998-2002.

NZGLS is based on:

• the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) of 15 descriptors documented on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) website at http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/ and issued by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 15836-2003;
• the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative "Metadata Terms" which specifies all metadata terms maintained by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, including elements, element refinements, encoding schemes, and vocabulary terms (the DCMI Type Vocabulary), published at: http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ ; and
• the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) Metadata Element Set, documented on the National Archives of Australia website at http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/gov_online/agls/summary.html and issued as AS 5044-2002.

NZGLS extends the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. It contains 4 additional elements and a number of different qualifiers that enable it to describe more categories of resources and allow richer description of resources. None the less, NZGLS is entirely compatible and interoperable with the Dublin Core element set. NZGLS is not intended to displace any other metadata standard. It is envisaged that NZGLS will coexist with other metadata standards, based on different semantics.