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| <p>Categorization of Government Information (CGI) Working Group of the Interagency Committee on Government Information</p> |
| <p><strong>Eighth Meeting, May 24, 2004 at White House Conference Center, Washington DC</strong></p> |
| <p><strong>CGI Members attending</strong></p> |
| <p>Chair (Eliot Christian, USGS)</p> |
| <p>Office of Intergovernmental Solutions (Susan Turnbull, GSA)</p> |
| <p>Superintendent of Documents (TC Evans, GPO)</p> |
| <p>Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (Susan Healy, US Courts)</p> |
| <p>Federal librarians (Gretchen Schlag, Navy and Richard Huffine, EPA)</p> |
| <p>Federal Enterprise Architecture (Eliot Christian, USGS)</p> |
| <p>CENDI (Jim Erwin, DTIC) </p> |
| <p>FGDC (Eliot Christian, USGS)</p> |
| <p>ICGI Electronic Records WG liaison (Susan Sullivan, NARA) </p> |
| <p>ICGI Content Management WG liaison (Joann McGovern, GSA), by telephone </p> |
| <p><strong>Others attending</strong></p> |
| <p>Marcia Christian, USGS (telephone)</p> |
| <p>Rob Davies, ePSINET</p> |
| <p>Andy Hoskinson, IAC</p> |
| <p>Brand Niemann, EPA (telephone)</p> |
| <p>Mary Rowlatt, ePSINET</p> |
| <p>Sahar Taman, Navy</p> |
| <p>The Working Group approved the previously distributed notes from the May 10, 2004 meeting. </p> |
| <p>Attendees of the meeting, in person and by telephone, introduced themselves. </p> |
| <p>A scheduled presentation was given by Mary Rowlatt and Rob Davies of the U.K. about the E-content initiative, ePSINet (European Public Sector Information Network) http://www.epsigate.org/ . Mary said that EPSINet represents 25 member states following a directive legislated on December 31, 2003. Within that framework she has a target date of January, 2005 to have UK information available on-line. Their driving motive is to be socially inclusive and to empower people. The project is driven by market support in order to be affordable, seeks to be scalable and based on international standards. They are using a modified Dublin Core, including a variety of encoding schemes. Some issues discussed were: (1) confusion between categories and "keywords", (2) metadata search capability, (3) development across all areas of government is patchy, (4) use of terms across communities, (5) public capacity for complexity, and (6) need for good quality metadata and upkeep. She explained their change management process and also gave examples of more local projects (Scotland is digitizing museum artifacts; Learn Direct for public sector training). Overall, she said they are encouraging the Europeans to adopt something more like the American model. They are promoting mandates, restrained by caution.</p> |
| <p>Susan Sullivan of NARA reported on activities of the ICGI Electronic Records Policy Working Group (ERPWG). She said that June 9th was when the group would discuss the revised report on Barriers. Concerning lessons learned; she said that they were asked to focus on root cause more than details. There will be a "straw man" release of metadata elements used.</p> |
| <p>Joann McGovern of GSA reported on activities of the ICGI Content Management Working. She said her group met last week. The document will go to ICGI executive committee today. The Subject Taxonomy group has been evaluating 35 large federal websites to get standards of categorization for improving FirstGov taxonomy. (Huffine suggests they get public input).</p> |
| <p>Gretchen Schlag reported progress on the CGI WG activity to define open, interoperable standards for categorizing Government information. She said they are going to OMB today and have no feedback yet. Some parts of their work came from the search interoperability work. They accepted the definition of categorizable government information. They removed a definition for levels of categorizing because that is in the GPO document. Perhaps there could be an article about the "levels of granularity". They do address issues of quality and give credit to libraries and GPO for work already done. They did not identify new stakeholders. There was discussion about when to indicate a unique field identifying a document or level of changed document. The broader issue is one of context and time dimension in order to categorize changing documents or collections. (Eliot suggested that it is important to define information objects outside of whether the technology to handle the concept exits today.) Discussion also addressed intellectual property rights. </p> |
| <p>Eliot Christian of USGS reported on the CGI WG activity to define open, interoperable standards for electronic searching. He recommended that the government adopt the search standard ISO 23950 to achieve broad scale interoperability. The cost of pursuing interoperability in this way in miniscule compared to the costs associated with search overall. (There was a discussion about "plug-ins" and query language and vendors.) There was some talk about persistent identifiers such as used by DOD. The ultimate decision probably goes to the Agency, not a government wide policy. Eliot walked through various approaches to interoperability: portals, common data model, applications programming interface, structured query language, and abstract modeling.</p> |
| <p>Jim Erwin reported progress on the CGI WG activity to define searchable identifiers. He said he is awaiting pre-clearance from OMB.</p> |
| <p>TC Evans reported progress on the CGI WG activity to define which government information should be categorized. He said the recommendation will be forthcoming.</p> |
| <p>The chair took updates of product target dates on the Work Plan for the CGI WG, based on best estimates from the four leaders of the CGI WG activities (Gretchen, Eliot, Jim, and TC). </p> |
| <p>The next meeting of the CGI Working Group will be held June 7, from 9:00-11:00 at the White House Conference Center.</p> |
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