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Search and delivery IIntegrated Searching Facilities in a Government Website
Kerry Webb AbstractThe ACT Department of Urban Services, during the redevelopment of its main Website, implemented a new search facility incorporating integrated searching across its X.500 functions and services directory, Website content and more significantly, the AGLS-compliant metadata developed for the site. The result - improved searching capability that includes the ability to search across discrete site components and for specific types of information such as reports and transactions. This paper explores how this was achieved and identifies the factors that were important in deciding what metadata was specified and how this was used in the search facility. BackgroundThe ACT Government has a mix of state and local government responsibilities and the Department of Urban Services is the agency that carries out the functions most closely related to local government. We register the dogs and we maintain the roads and traffic lights and we approve buildings and we run the libraries, and there are around sixty different business units in the Department. We've had an effective Website for about five years and because we had the first major Web presence in the ACT Government, we've also run the main www. act. gov. au infrastructure on behalf of the Chief Minister's Department. In 1999, the Department recognised that our Website needed to be overhauled, so we proceeded to not only redevelop the site to make it more useful to our customers, but to build a system that our staff could use to maintain the site effectively. We set out a number of requirements for the new site and the new content management system (CMS).The primary objectives were to provide good customer service and empower custodians to ensure quality content and services. The site had to be easier to use and it had to incorporate good searching capabilities. The CMS had to be easy for staff to create and maintain content, it had to have effective backup and recovery facilities, and it had to interoperate with other systems within the ACT Government. At the time that we were planning the CMS, the most significant other system that we were using was the functions and services directory. This is an X. 500-based system, similar to the commonwealth government's GOLD directory, with contact details for all ACT government employees, information on all organisational units and descriptions of a wide variety of services and functions carried out by the government together with how to access these services (including postal addresses, phone numbers, URLs and e-mail addresses). The system operates on the VIEW500 software (supplied by Adacel) and is present in two images - an internal view (accessible through the whole of government intranet) which contains all of the information listed above, and an external version accessible through the Web which has the same organisations and functional information, but limits the staff contact details to senior officers only. Figure 1 is a sample of the content in the directory. Figure 1. Sample entry from the functions and services directory
The directory provides an extremely rich source of information about the ACT Government, both for internal and external users. Of course, this comes at a cost, especially for the personnel information which changes more frequently than information about organisational units or functions and services. Extensive training and auditing are undertaken to ensure that the directory's content is very accurate and kept up to date. In developing the new website, it was our intention to provide the best possible resource discovery (with emphasis on both navigation and search facilities) and we believed that this could best be done by integrating the searching across the website content, the metadata associated with that content and the directory. We still believe that, but there is now some question about just how this integration is best done. Around the time that the CMS was being specified, another system was being considered - one which will potentially have a significant impact on this and all other operations in the government. The integrated document management system (IDMS) will eventually manage all sorts of electronic documents used by all agencies of the ACT Government. By a fortunate coincidence, the team working on this system was located in the same area as the CMS team and we were able to share many ideas and plans, especially concerning metadata which will be an important aspect of both systems, although for slightly different reasons. The metadata in the CMS will be primarily for resource recovery, with some use in document management, while the emphasis in the IDMS is reversed. We did acknowledge though that we should both have simple metadata creation methodologies (so that custodians would not be turned off by the effort required) and that if possible we should use a common system for the creation and management of the metadata. We still believe this, but it seems that the common system may not be the best solution to our needs. Early developmentsThe CMS project started with the contractors (Wizard Information Services) carrying out an audit of the existing Urban Services and ACT Government Websites, followed by a report on the metadata standards that we should be using in the system. The report began by pointing to the generally poor level of metadata which had been implemented to date, noting such occurrences as the use of DDC numbers in the Subject field and various generic keywords relating to the ACT or the Canberra region. The report also noted that the poor quality of the metadata had little impact on the usefulness of the Websites because it had never been used at all for searching, either on the sites themselves or by external search engines. The report made certain recommendations about the schemas to be used for the various metadata elements. They included: Subject: Topics from the Business Entry Point (BEP) controlled vocabulary and, for the ANZLIC Place element, a list of geographic extent names in the ACT The report also proposed that much of the data relating to creator and publisher (contact names, e-mail etc) could be obtained at the time of creation from the functions and services directory. Most of these recommendations have been adopted, although for the Subject field, we recognised that the vocabulary used by the BEP (as a business-oriented service) is not totally appropriate for an organisation with the varied functions of the Department of Urban Services. Accordingly, we have decided to use a modified form of the Keyword AAA Thesaurus, which will also be the basis of the IDMS, thus achieving the aim of providing some standardisation between these two systems. At this stage, we are not sure that using Keyword AAA is the best solution for Website metadata, and we will be monitoring this over the early life of the system. The next significant task was the selection of a search engine. After evaluating a number of products, we decided to choose Ultraseek as the one that best met our needs. We found in this evaluation that although some search software could provide searching over an X. 500 directory, it was by no means a straightforward process and to integrate the search activity and merge the results may not be worth the effort. This possibly needs a little explanation. While it seemed like a very good idea to search all possible sources to ensure that the most complete list of results can be presented, there are some difficulties. The urban services website will quite likely contain more than one page which satisfies the search criteria - perhaps in an overall list of services offered by the department and also in the detailed information contained in the subsite of a business unit -which should be checked by the search software to limit the number of duplicates presented to the user. Of course, pages can only be detected as duplicates if they are nearly identical. If we add entires found in the directory to this list, it will be almost impossible to either weed out duplicates or to merge the Directory entries with web pages found based on text or metadata searching. Given time and appropriate resources, this would be an interesting research project, but working with what we have, we eventually decided to avoid close integration in the display of search results. The Directory will be searched separately and the results will be presented in a separate grouping from the Web pages found (The preferred and final layouts of search results are set out below in Figures 3 and 4) But this matter of directory vs web pages in result sets did become an issue in the next major development in the project, as described later in the paper. Figure 3. Preferred display of results from searching for 'dogs' Results of your search for 'dogs'
Figure 4. 'Compromise' display of results from searching for 'dogs' Results of your search for 'dogs'
Further developmentsIn the middle of 2000, the ACT Chief Minister announced that the Government would be establishing a facility to streamline the various modes of service - shopfronts, telephone, online and electronic kiosks - together under the one organisation. The new organisation, called Canberra Connect, will have as its main online service a portal containing information about all services offered by the ACT Government and links to those that could be delivered online. As part of the planning for the portal, a complete audit of online services from the ACT Government was carried out and we defined a standard representation of information about the services. We recognised that this did duplicate, to a certain extent, the information about these services that was maintained in the Directory, but the decision had been taken that the portal would provide a better source for this information. Actually there is potentially further duplication involved here, because much of the information about services is also contained on the electronic kiosks, however we are planning to serve the kiosk information from the portal system. These complications illustrate a major problem that all organisations will face in managing not only their Websites but also other information resources such as directories. The ACT Government Directory is a very important and useful tool for users within and outside the Government, but it does require a considerable amount of maintenance and auditing. Within Urban Services alone we achieve something like 98% accuracy in the Directory, but only through random sampling where 100 entries are checked each week by calling the people listed in those entries. Under circumstances such as this, there is an incentive to limit the number of repositories of duplicate information. Unfortunately, it is not always easy or possible to use the same repository for a number of purposes. A directory may be created to provide specific information for a predefined purpose. To extend the utility of this information in this form may seem to be an attractive option, but the extra work involved in tailoring it to a different purpose may not be worth the result, even if it can be so tailored. It is possible that systems being developed in the future will be more amenable to multiple use and there are software products being developed which appear to perform the sort of searching across diverse repositories that we initially envisaged, but we weren't able to do this for this project. What we've decided to do - for the moment at least - is to maintain the Directory as it is and to develop the Urban Services and Canberra Connect Websites, noting that there will be some duplication of effort in maintaining both types of information. Fortunately, in the system being developed by Wizard, the information being used to create pages for both of the Websites can be shared. For example, contact information for the Motor Vehicle Registry (an Urban Services activity) is held in a database and extracted to create HTML pages on both sites. The system does this by using XML, and it is possible that the extended use of XML may provide much of the utility that we are seeking. If the X. 500 directory, for instance, could utilise XML we would be in a better position to export the data to a variety of systems. We are also investigating the best way to incorporate ACT community information into our searching. We are aware of what's being done elsewhere - notably in South Australia -and we are considering the extent to which we can help community organisations to create metadata for their sites and to incorporate it into our integrated searching capabilities. One of the reasons that we are doing this is the very broad range of questions that get asked of government organisations, which is particularly noticeable for those who answer the phones over the holiday period. If we can provide better resource discovery over the widest range of sources, we'll be serving our community better. SummarySo, we now find ourselves about to implement a system that's not quite going to do what we wanted, interoperating (or capable of interoperating) with some of the systems that we originally planned, and having to take account of services which didn't exist when we started the development. So, what's remarkable about that? Well, it's probably costing a little more than we'd like, but we are delivering the system, and it's able to provide considerably better functionality than we have at the moment. We will have another comprehensive source of information about ACT Government services, after the Directory. It won't deliver an integrated list of search results, but after going through the whole process of auditing our services, we're confident that we will be delivering to our users what they want. And the custodians will be more easily able to find, manage and maintain content and metadata. The sites discussed in this paper will be online in their new form from 1 March 2001. They are: ACT Government: http://www.act.gov.au Canberra Connect: http://www.canberraconnect.act.gov.au Urban Services: http://www.act.gov.au/urbanservices/ |
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