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10 LIM 7 (2010)
The Metadata Model for Directgov

handle is hein.journals/leginfom10 and id is 13 raw text is: Legal Information Management, 10 (2010), pp. 7-9 © The British and Irish Association of Law Librarians doi:l10. 10 17/S 1472669610000241 The Metadata Model for Directgov Directgov is the UK government's vehicle for online public service delivery to individuals, consisting of the website www.direct.gov.uk, plus interactive TV and mobile services. It aims to offer users an easy-to-use and coherent experience, enabling people to find infor- mation and transact with government by bringing together content and services from across the whole delivery spectrum. The direct.gov.uk site currently receives around 20 million visits a month and is regu- larly the most visited government website. Traffic is expected to increase as the range of available services grows and public awareness of the brand rises. Directgov also has a valuable role to play within government. It helps enable departments to reduce the amount of money they spend creating and maintaining websites and it helps promote a shift away from more expensive telephone and face-to-face contacts. Because of its significant reach to the public, it is a powerful digital channel for departments to promote key messages. Directgov, along with the other two key government sites, http://www.businesslink.gov.uk and NHS Choices, is at the heart of a convergence programme which will see hundreds of public sector websites closed down. Their content will be re-purposed and moved onto these three main sites. Directgov will increase its scope to include many new pages of content, and new tools, across a wide range of public service areas. This rapid ingestion of new content presents an inter- esting challenge in terms of findability and site structure. There is a small risk that important content may not be as easy to find as at present and that key user journeys will be lengthened or made more complex. Therefore, work has been underway for some time to design the next iter- ation of Directgov which will offer a flexible, scaleable infrastructure that protects and enhances the user experi- ence and continues to provide departments with an effec- tive medium for communication. The use of metadata, in conjunction with business rules, underpins this work. This article will cover the user experience and product developments that metadata will play a role in delivering, and detail the work that is being done to make this happen. An expanded metadata model and new taxonomies will provide the infrastructure to tag content and, more importantly, to use that tagging to meet various business needs. Flexible site structure Currently Directgov is organised hierarchically with 16 top-level sections, with a mix of topics and audiences. This navigation tree is hard-wired into the Content Management Scheme (CMS), meaning that moving content or implementing new nodes requires technical intervention. In future, the site hierarchy should be stored and managed outside the CMS, and simply uploaded when changed. The site structure is, somewhat understandably for a website that aggregates content from across govern- ment, subject to internal debate and can be conten- tious. Managing it as metadata and business rules offers an opportunity to assemble the site more flexibly, so that changes can easily be made to move nodes around, or to add and delete whole new sections when content changes and user needs demand it. It also provides greater flexibility for creating content aggregations that are only temporary, such as budget day or severe weather events. Directgov has faced criticism from various sources about the findability of its content through browsing, although its findability ratings do compare favourably with other websites in the financial sector, which often have complex and legal content. The metadata-based approach, subject to the right business processes and technical implementation, means that content can easily be found in different places. Allied to the more flexible site structure will be the ability to cross-sell related content more intuitively. For example, related links can be generated automati- cally based on relationships in the taxonomies, or related tags can be used as a means of exposing con- textually-relevant content which users might not other- wise have seen by searching or browsing through the navigation.

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