[LINK] Australian Government web sites

[Chirgwin, Richard]

If metadata standards exist, Kevin asks,
>why aren't some of those standards in wider use for, for example, 
>press releases?

Lots of reasons. The starting point is that the most common of all document
creators, MS Word, doesn't help wrap documents in metadata.

That means to wrap any meaningful metadata around the document, you either
need (a) a document management environment (and these are expensive and in
many places turn into expensive shelware); or you need to double-handle the
documents to add the metadata.

Richard Chirgwin

-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Littlejohn [mailto:darius@obsidian.com.au]
Sent: Thursday, 29 November 2001 11:31
To: link@www.anu.edu.au
Subject: Re: [LINK] Australian Government web sites 



>>> Tom Worthington wrote
> At 03:17  27/11/01 +1100, Sue Bushell wrote:
> >Does anyone happen to know of any organization which rates Australian 
> >Government web sites on issues of usability, accessibility, information 
> >content etc? ...
> 
> According to the NOIE "The Guide to Minimum Web Site Standards" 
>
<http://www.govonline.gov.au/projects/strategy/The_Guide_to_Minimum_Web_Site
_
Standards/> 
> there are standards for: Information provision, Metadata, Electronic 
> publishing, Electronic Record Keeping and Archiving, Web Content 
> Accessibility, Authentication, Privacy and Security. Where these are 
> adaptions of old standards which pre-date the web, they tend to have 
> reporting and enforcement mechanisms (including criminal penalties). Newer

> ones tend not to.

My standard complaint here.  If there's standards for Metadata and
Information 
Provision, why aren't some of those standards in wider use for, for example,

press releases?  Given most press releases end up on the web, but in
anything 
from plain text to pdf...

http://www.lobby.com.au/ is now archiving press releases from about 3 or 4 
states - but it's bad archival, because the metadata that travels with press

releases is atrocious - when it's there, it's in a different format for
every 
body that releases info, where press releases are archived (and
finance.gov.au 
seem to be the only body making a real effort in that direction), they're 
archived in a very haphazard way, in a variety of formats on a variety of 
machines.  Actually accessing the archive in any meaningful way is not
really 
possible atm.

How would one go about trying to tie all this stuff together?  Having a 
searchable archive of press releases, with good metadata, would be an asset,
I 
would have thought.  We're doing the best we can "after the fact", but it'd
be
a great thing to be able to attack the problem at it's source.

KJL
-- 
Internet techie                    Obsidian Consulting Group
Phone: +613 9653 9364                    Fax: +613 9354 2681
http://www.obsidian.com.au/           darius@obsidian.com.au