The Local Government Association of Tasmania’s (LGAT) Local Government Online Services program has developed a package that will increase residents’ ability to find information on Local Government nationally via the Internet.
Part I of the IDEA project identified issues people have finding Local Government information on websites. IDEA Part II was designed to address this and provide Councils with an easy to use toolkit that would aid the discovery of information on their Council’s websites.
Information Discovery and Exchange Across Government (IDEA II) has been developed as a Local Government metadata framework and metadata tools.
Metadata is code built into a website and one of the most powerful ways that website information is discovered through its correct application. It can be defined as data that describes other data. In the case of web pages, metadata provides the ability to manage information by storing information about the web page such as title, description, creator and date modified. It also assists with performing searches by searching against metadata tags, such as the ‘keywords’ tag.
LGAT Technical Policy Manager, Brian Oliver, said that the metadata tools include a harvesting tool, a thesaurus and a spy tool.
“The spy tool interrogates online resources and pulls apart their metadata,” he said. “The user can then contextualise this data and use it how they like.”
IDEA II was managed under a tripartite agreement between the National Office for the Information Economy, the Department of Premier and Cabinet in Tasmania and LGAT.
Twenty-four out of Tasmania’s 29 Councils have adopted the Unity Content Management System (CMS) to redesign and administer their websites. CMSs are good for maintaining large and dynamic Council websites. This has led to increased consistency of experience by users of Tasmanian Council websites, along with an increased range of useful, local information presented on these sites.
The Unity CMS application across Tasmania has also had the advantage of providing direct links to Council Connect (a portal to Tasmanian Local Council services and information, such as payment methods, jobs and business resources), to ensure it is up to date.
Brian Oliver, said that the $380,000 budget was provided by Networking the Nation, an Australian Government initiative to assist economic and social development initiatives in rural Australia.
IDEA took out the Information Technology category at the 2005 National Awards for Local Government.
For further information contact Brian Oliver on (03) 6233 5963.
