CLF for the Internet - Navigation and Format

Common Look and Feel Metadata Standard Definitions and HTML Examples

TBITS 39: Treasury Board Information Management Standard, Part 1: Government On-Line Metadata Standard

META Tag Generator is a tool which accepts user input and will generate HTML code according to the standard which can be pasted into an HTML page.

These five metadata elements are part of the 15 element Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, the leading international metadata standard for on-line resource discovery.

Rationale

Metadata is a key tool in describing and managing information assets. It is particularly important to have an effective identification system for information assets since many are invisible, hidden in Web sites or databases, until a user initiates a search to find the assets relevant to a current need. Whether we in the public service or our clients in the Canadian public are the searchers, we need an effective way to use the labels on our information assets to find them when we need them. You can see that the chair you are sitting on is a chair without looking at the bar code label, but an electronic document is invisible until its label or its text is found by a search tool.

The benefits of using a systematic way of assigning and structuring metadata include:

• Relevance: Providing information that search engines can use to find relevant documents in large collections such as Web sites or document databases where text search alone brings up many irrelevant documents or lists of documents too long for users to look at.
• Identity: Providing descriptive information so that users can tell how old a document is, who wrote it, or how to get additional information. Most documents on government Web sites now cannot tell the user whether they are 5 days old or 5 years old. Sometimes the user wants one, sometimes the other. Metadata helps a user know if the information is reliable and current.
• Inventory: A list of what information the Government holds so that the information can be managed, tracked, updated, analyzed and used efficiently.
• Consistency: The Dublin core, an international metadata standard provides the framework and many of the rules for use so that metadata can be applied consistently in large and diverse organizations such as the Government of Canada. This creates an environment in which users can search for and find information without needing to know which department produced it or to which program it relates.
• Interoperability: An international metadata standard such as Dublin Core provides a way for information resources in electronic form to communicate their existence and their nature to other electronic applications (e.g. via HTML or XML) or search tools and to permit migration of information between applications or search systems.
• Policy compliance: A critical component of meeting the Management of Government Information Holdings (MGIH) policy requirement to know and be able to find the information Government holds.

For more information see: Selecting and Implementing a Metadata Standard for the Government of Canada

Interpretation

Essentially information about information, metadata is made up of elements that define standard descriptions of information holdings. This CLF standard is based on Dublin Core and requires GoC institutions to describe Internet resources using five mandatory metatags in document headers: Title, Originator, Language of Resource, Date and Controlled Subject. Link: Common Look and Feel Metadata Standard Definitions and HTML Examples

The Canada Site includes a Web crawler that indexes departmental sites to create a searchable central index. As departments create metatags to describe their information holdings, the Web crawler will incorporate these records in the central index. The Canada Site search index will be configured to recognize Dublin Core metatags and use them in ranking and displaying results.

6.3 Best Practices

To complement the use of these mandatory GoC metatags, Web developers should also ensure that the HTML Title element and two HTML meta elements, Description and Keywords are specified. Authors should use the Title element to identify the contents of a document. Since users often consult documents out of context, authors should provide context-rich titles. The content of the HTML Title tag is displayed as the window header in a Web browser, in bookmarks and in search results. Common search engines may use the contents of the Keywords tag to improve the quality of search results. The contents of the Description tag may be displayed as a summary in search results. The display of these elements is limited in length by browsers and search engines.

Departments or Web sites requiring additional metadata elements should use the additional Dublin Core elements as a starting point. In accordance with the Government of Canada Metadata Framework domain specific metadata element sets may be developed with the mandatory Common Look and Feel and additional Dublin Core metadata elements at their core.

Indexing Federal Government Web Pages: Guidelines for the Development of an Indexing Policy (November 2002)

These guidelines were developed by members of the GOL Metadata working Group during the summer of 2002 and approved at the September 17, 2002 meeting. This document targets departments developing indexing policies for the population of the Common Look and Feel mandatory element <dc.subject>.

Two user-friendly web-based guides are now available on the Council of Federal Libraries' site (September 2002)

An Implementation Guide for Metadata Developers offers practical assistance to those responsible for creating metadata content for federal government Web pages in accordance with the Common Look and Feel standard. It explains the tasks to be performed, demonstrates how the required information should be created and directs readers to other resources. It also provides instructions on how and where to insert the required source codes into a Web document.
An Implementation Guide for Metadata Managers offers assistance to managers responsible for meeting the CLF metadata standard.
The guides were created by an interdepartmental, cross-disciplinary team of metadata practitioners lead by the Council of Federal Libraries' Metadata Action Team.
The guides' home page is: http://www.collectionscanada.ca/6/37/s37-4016-e.html
The Council of Federal Libraries welcomes your comments on the guides. Please send them to: nippni@nlc-bnc.ca.

How to register a controlled vocabulary or thesaurus for use in dc.subject on federal government Web sites:

Registering a Standardized Vocabulary

Links

Search to select subject descriptors:
Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus Depository Services Program (Communication Canada)

Common Look and Feel Metadata Standard Definitions and HTML Examples

Treasury Board Secretariat Information Management Resource Centre References and Resources for Metadata

Training materials for applying Dublin Core metadata