Metadata Examples

Tom Worthington FACS

Visiting Fellow, Department of Computer Science, Australian National University, Canberra

For: Computing 3410 Students, The Australian National University
This document is Version 1.0 8 August 2002: http://www.tomw.net.au/2002/mdex.html

Introduction

This material was prepared for the unit Information Technology in Electronic Commerce (COMP3410) at the Australian National University, semester 2, 2000. Accompanying documents discuss A Common Understanding and Electronic Document Management and the Digital Library for E-commerce.

Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) metadata standard

The Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) metadata standard is a set of 19 descriptive elements to improve the visibility and accessibility of services and information over the Internet (NAA 2000a). The AGLS standard is based upon the Dublin Core international online resource discovery metadata standard (OCLC 2000).

www.fed.gov.au, the Commonwealth Government Entry Point, offers comprehensive and integrated access to Federal Government information.

You will find a concentrated body of Australian Commonwealth Government information through this site. www.fed.gov.au currently signposts over 500 Federal Government web sites, indexes more than 1,000,000 pages and uses both metadata and free text indexing to ensure it is a comprehensive government portal...

The site runs on a Sparc E450 Unix server and uses the CiTR AccessPoint software suite. It is constantly updated through harvesting in accordance with our Information Governance Policy.

The topic trees are maintained by Department Of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts staff ...

From: "About this site", Commonwealth Government Entry Point, URL: http://www.fed.gov.au/KSP?phase=6b67e8:ef81ac6a2f:-4e3d&action=menuAbout

This fed.gov.au page includes AGLS metadata:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html dir="ltr" lang="en">

<head>

<title>About - fed.gov.au</title> <meta content="http://www.fed.gov.au/" name="DC.Identifier" scheme="URI">
<meta content="corporateName=Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts; jurisdiction=Commonwealth; contact=; address=; email=; sector=government" name="DC.Creator">
<meta content="corporateName=Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts; jurisdiction=Commonwealth; contact=; address=; email=; sector=government" name="DC.Publisher">
<meta content="Copyright (c) Commonwealth of Australia 2001" name="DC.Rights">
<meta content="fed.gov.au" name="DC.Title">
<meta content="Commonwealth Government Entry Point" name="DC.Subject" scheme="">
<meta content="Entry point for access to Australian Commonwealth Government sites" name="DC.Description">
<meta content="en" name="DC.Language" scheme="RFC1766">
<meta content="Commonwealth" name="DC.Coverage.jurisdiction">
<meta content="Australia" name="DC.Coverage.spatial">
<meta content="" name="AGLS.Function" scheme="AGIFT">
<meta content="public" name="AGLS.Audience" scheme="agls-audience">
<meta content="2001-09-24" name="DC.Date.created" scheme="ISO8601">
<meta content="2002-09-24" name="DC.Date.valid" scheme="ISO8601">
<meta content="2001-09-24" name="DC.Date.issued" scheme="ISO8601">
<meta content="service" name="DC.Type.category">
<meta content="enquiries" name="DC.Type.serviceType" scheme="agls-service">
<meta content="text/html" name="DC.Format" scheme="IMT">
<meta content="" name="AGLS.Availability.contact">
<meta content="" name="AGLS.Availability.hours">
<meta content="" name="AGLS.Availability.email">
<meta content="toll free service" name="AGLS.Availability.cost">

From: "About this site", Commonwealth Government Entry Point, URL: http://www.fed.gov.au/KSP?phase=6b67e8:ef81ac6a2f:-4e3d&action=menuAbout

The site provides an advanced search for specific metadata values.

Reg

The Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC Pty Ltd), has produced a metadata tool to create AGLS and Dublin Core metadata. Reg, can be used to automatically generate AGLS metadata using an approved form of syntax. This is also a useful way to learn about the syntax.

... Reg allows you to:

Reg uses metadata schemas to customize itself for different metadata element sets. Some samples are provided below, or you can write your own by following the schema documentation and using the example schemas as a guide.

From: Reg - Lightweight metadata editor, DSTC, 6 January 2000

Reg can extract metadata from HTML documents (as is done for the Commonwealth Government Entry Point):

Schema: Dublin Core (schema)
AGLS - Australian Government Locator Service (version 1.2) (schema)
AGLS - Australian Government Locator Service (version 1.1) (schema)
AGLS - Australian Government Locator Service (version 1.0) (schema)
EdNA - Education Network Australia (schema)
QLDGOV - Queensland Government IS#34 (schema)
 Other schema, URL= 
Identifier:
Initial values:

Example of a Reg screen

Further Information

Copyright © Tom Worthington 2002.