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GCN Home > 11/07/05 issue

OMB mulls evolving beyond GILS

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

Agency looks for ideas on replacing metadata tagging for document searches

Agencies submit more than 3,000 annual requests to the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for permission to collect public data. And many of those requests turn into a federal record that needs to be searchable by other agencies and the public.

But the records contain more than just text—they can include audio, video and images, including geospatial data. Which leads to the question: Is the current system, known as the Government Information Locator Service, enough?

GILS is based on International Organization for Standardization’s 23950 search standard and uses title, author, publisher, date and place.

Called for in the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, it has been active since 1996. But reports from nonprofit and other organizations over the last decade said that agencies use GILS sparingly.

Seeking better ideas

Now OMB is asking whether technology has surpassed GILS, which officials said relies on metadata tagging, and whether there is something that is less costly and more effective for searching the mounds of government data.

“The question is whether we want to go down the GILS road again, or hasn’t current search technology leapfrogged metadata tagging?” said Glenn Schlarman, chief of OMB’s information policy and technology branch. “GILS is time-consuming and arduous to do.”

OMB, through the General Services Administration, recently released a request for information asking vendors for ideas for more “efficient and effective information retrieval and sharing.” Responses were due Oct. 21, and OMB expects to analyze the answers this month.

The RFI lays out several scenarios—which Schlarman called a “bake-off”—representing feasible search requests that might be submitted to federal databases.

Two examples would be researching unexplained illnesses among defense contractors or sharing law enforcement information across jurisdictions.

The scenarios will provide context and help vendors frame their responses, said Andy Hoskinson, an OMB support contractor with Unisys Corp.

Improving online access

OMB released the RFI in part to meet the mandates set forth in the E-Government Act of 2002, which calls for improving online access to government information.

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



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