[LINK] Web Standards for the Australian Government

[Tom Worthington]

Greetings from the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) in Canberra,
where the October Web Standards Group meeting was held
<http://webstandardsgroup.org/meetings/index.cfm?event_id=181>.

Today's speakers were:

1: Neil Philips - FOI Legislative Requirements to Publish Information On
the Web
2: Raven Calais - WCAG 2.0 and the Website Accessibility National
Transition Strategy
3: Gordon Grace - Making Better Use of On-line Data
4: Eileen Tannachion - Changes to the Australian Government Locator
Service Metadata Standard

The MC for the day was Tony Corcoran, Assistant Secretary, Freedom of
Information and Information Management Branch, Department of Defence. He
admitted that the Defence Department was not well prepared for new
Government FOI legislative requirements (but it sounded like they were
making rapid progress to be ready in time). Defence is doubling the
capacity of their records management system from 30,000 to 60,000 users.
An imaging system is being installed. Also many routine manuals which
are currently on the internal intranet will be moved to the Internet to
avoid the need for FOI requests.

Tony modestly said that his area of Defence was not "technical" being
staffed by policy people. I have no doubt that there are suitably
qualified people from information disciplines in Defence to write policy
(I used to be one of them).


1: Neil Philips "FOI Legislative Requirements to Publish Information On
the Web".

The new FOI procedures from 1 May 2011 are for more proactive
disclosure. Public servants have protection under the legislation if
they accidentally release something they should not. The legislation
provides for agencies to sell documents, but hopefully most material
will be provided freely online.

The main requirement is that the agency publish on its web site a list
of information about the information they have (metadata) an
organisation chart and other details about what the agency does. What
was not clear to me was if there are standards for the format used for
lists of information. It would make sense if all agencies used the same
format and there was a government wide search facility provided. The
Information Commissioner is expected to produce guidelines in November.


2: Raven Calais - WCAG 2.0 and the Website Accessibility National
Transition Strategy

Raven started by saying the presentation would be provided afterwards,
so I shouted out "in an accessible format?". She replied that there were
some accessibility problems with Powerpoint and so the presentations
would be offered in other formats.

Raven pointed out that accessibility is not just for a small group
identified as "disabled", such as just the blind. Accessibility is an
issue for much of the community at different times in their lives.
Currently 20% of the Australian population identify themselves as having
a disability. People with a disability have a higher unemployment rate.
Accessibility is about social inclusiveness.

The Online and Communications Council of Australia agreed that all
federal, state and local government web sites would be WCAG 2 complaint
by November 2012.

Federal FMA agencies are required to be Level A compliant by 31 December
2012 and Level double A by 31 December 2014.

AGIMO has a National Transitional Strategy. This involves agencies first
taking a stock take of what web sites they have, then checking current
compliance, then assessing the publishing process and what barriers
there might be. Barriers might be a lack of training in accessibility
for web staff in a decentralised web publishing process.

AGIMO is developing a Community of Expertise (COE) under the AGIMO blog.
This will then be updated to be a forum and have a document repository.

Raven stated that PDF, RTF and MS Word files are not accessible and so
accessible HTML alternatives are required for these. I found this a
refreshingly frank and practical approach. In theory it is possible to
create accessible PDF, RTF and MS Word files, but as Raven says, there
are not sufficient tools and techniques to support these in practice. In
my view a sensible approach for agencies would be to implement
accessible HTML which also displays and prints well. Agencies could then
dispense with the complexity and expense of creating versions of
documents in PDF, RTF and MS Word. The one HTML version would be
suitable for all uses.

Raven nominated Canada as leading the way with accessibility.

Expected skill sets for roles are to be released soon. This would help
me in teaching web accessibility to public servants at ANU.

I was very impressed with Raven's practical approach to accessibility.

Funnelback then provided afternoon tea.


3: Gordon Grace then talked on "Making Better Use of On-line Data".

Gordon pointed out that data web sites are not that exciting and
data.gov.au (which is not online yet) will be no exception. The idea is
to provide access to "raw data" which can then be combined and
processed. To me this is conceptually very similar (and uses many of the
same technical standards) as data repositories for research. The USA's
data.gov was launched May 2009, Australia's beta data.Australia.gov.au
ina October 2009, UK's data.gov.uk relaunched May 2009. AGLS, AGIFT,
DCAT, Dublin Core, hCard, vCard and X500 were some standards used for
gov.au.

Gordon pointed out that budget papers are now being published under a
creative commons licence, but the data tables are currently GIF images
and so not usable as data.

Gordon mentioned that he would not be able to in in GOVDEX online
discussions of data in the future as he had left the public service and
so would not have a gov.au email address. I found this curious as I have
previously taken part in GOVDEX discussions as an industry expert.

Gordon showed an interesting example of XHTML with RDFa embedded. This
allows data fields (such as phone numbers) to be identified in web
pages. This allows both human and machine readable web pages. He pointed
out these could be particularly useful for smart phones, if standards
were supported. One difficulty this will cause is that "hits" on web
sites may be reduced as data can be extracted from the web site once and
provided via an intermediary. Gordon suggested that academics working on
citation statistics might have a solution for this, but judging by the
session I attended at ANU yesterday on assessing research.

Gordon suggested that providing data would be one way for agencies to
easily able to meet FOI requests.


4: Eileen Tannachion - Changes to the Australian Government Locator
Service Metadata Standard

Eileen started by pointing out that AGLIS is now a Australian Standard
AS 5044-2010 and so is not just for government use. The updated standard
supports new Dublin Core features. Thesauri are AGIFT and TAGS.

AGRkMS is a subset of SPIRIT. AGLS has considerable compatibility with
AGRkMS but is not a strict subset of it.

Recent changes to AGLS include: linked data, semantic web and 2008 DC
abstract model. AGLS qualifiers are "aglsterms". Some XML examples and
encodings were removed. Five additional DC terms were added and included
in AGLS. Two new AGLS terms were added: dateLicenced and
protectiveMarking. The document type vocabulary is now common with
AGRkMS. AGLS.audience has been replaced ith DC.audience.
DC.Coverage.postcode will be replaced with a geo-spatial term still
being worked on. Some other vocabularies have been updated. Some
properties are now "recommended".

Challenges with AGLS include implementing in HTML 4.01 (I wonder about
HTML 5?). Also the issue Google is starting to collect some of the
metadata (will Funnleback?).

Social media advice was issued September 2010. Web Archiving Policy was
will be issued the end of October 2010. The new AGLS manual will be
issued as an exposure draft in November 2010. This will be useful for my
new "Electronic Document Management" course at the ANU.

Ruth Ellison ended by asking for help with future WSG events:
organising, speakers, venues and sponsors.

See also blog version of these notes with links:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/10/web-standards-for-australian-government.html>.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/