Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 09/13/04 issue

Permanent data tags would keep data visible

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Although the government posts millions of important documents on Web sites, there’s no guarantee that Web crawlers will hit on any one document’s URLs or find pertinent data buried within.

The Categorization of Government Information Working Group of the Interagency Committee on Government Information is drawing up guidelines to apply permanent identification tags to all public government documents, regardless of where they reside.

A working group team led by James Erwin, director of information science and technology for the Defense Technical Information Center, will submit recommendations later this year to the Office of Management and Budget requiring that agencies use the tags.

The group favors what are called searchable identifiers as permanent addresses.

These identifiers would “uniquely identify an information object and support persistent access to that object across time and space,” said Erwin, speaking at a recent conference held by the Federal Library and Information Center Committee.

Searchable identifiers would also make it possible to find metadata about a piece of information, such as the information’s date of creation.

The identifiers also would distinguish the information from its storage systems, Erwin said.

Tag, you’re it

“Persistent identification lets you put content and metadata out on the Web so other people can reference your content, either in their visual documents or in their library catalogs,” Erwin said.

So, if an agency transferred old documents from its site to the National Archives and Records Administration, the addresses would remain the same, even though they would have a new host agency.

DTIC uses a searchable-identifier system to categorize 120,000 technical reports. Other Defense Department librarians have incorporated DTIC’s handle system, along with attached descriptive data, into their own electronic catalogs.

“Customers can search on a site that has a lot of non-DTIC information, but when they click on a handle, they go to DTIC for the authoritative information,” Erwin said.

DOD’s Advanced Distributed Learning initiative also uses the searchable-identifier approach. The program’s Shareable Content Object Reference Model standard breaks educational materials into smaller instructional objects that can be strung together to make new lessons, Erwin said.

More news on related topics: Content / Record Management, IT Management, Web Strategies



GCN Popup