[LINK] ICT Predictions 2009 - little OT (gov't reports example)

[Tom Worthington]

At 11:18 AM 23/01/2009, anthony.w.hornby at gmail.com wrote:
>Thanks for the info Tom,
>
> > Providing the URL of the document on the web should meet the 
> requirement to "supply" a copy.
>
>We'd still prefer a way to get that delivered to us automatically so 
>we don't have to go searching for it. We don't want government 
>pushing the cost of their disorganisation on to us. ...

My proposal was that an index to publications would be automatically 
generated and made available online. This would obviously include an 
alert service to tell you what new publications there are available. 
You could then select those you did want and click on the link to get 
them. This would seem to me to be more convenient than having the 
government send you copies of stuff, most of which you probably don't want.

>It that light it would still be prefereable to have one area do this 
>gathering of material into a structured repository that everyone 
>else could just harvest from automatically ... probably pay for 
>someone to gather, mark-up and ingest everything into a repository. ...

Yes, I was proposing a small modification to the government's 
existing search engine, so it could identify and specially index 
"reports". This would be similar to the way it already collects media 
releases from Australian Government websites, providing a search 
service  <http://australia.gov.au/News_and_Media>, list by portfolio 
<http://media.australia.gov.au/notify/releases-by-portfolio.html> and 
RSS feed: <http://media.australia.gov.au/notify/rss.cgi>.

If this was then used as the official list of reports, it would 
provide a powerful incentive for agencies to include the required 
metadata. If they did not do so their report would not be identified 
and would therefore not be considered to have been prepared. 
Parliamentary committees and others would then be asking the agencies 
why they had not complied with the requirements to submit their reports.

>... If not a central repository then at least a structured feed of 
>some sort we could harvest from that tied together all the web links 
>with a standard metadata schema ...

Yes, I was suggesting using the Dublin Core metadata standard for 
government reports, as this is already the government standard for web pages.

>  In the short term I'll be looking closely at what NLA is doing 
> with PANDORA as this might meet most of our need. ...

Yes, Pandora would be a good option.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University