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Designing a National Standard for Discovery Metadata Improving Access to Digital Information in the Dutch Government Jeff Rothenberg, Irma Graafland-Essers, Harry Kranenkamp, Abigail Lierens, Constantijn van Oranje, Rob van Schaik Prepared for Advies Overheid.nl and funded by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations The research described in this report was prepared for Advies Overheid.nl and funded by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations. The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit research organization providing objective analysis and effective solutions that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors around the world. RAND’s publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. R® is a registered trademark. © Copyright 2005 Stitchting ICTU All rights reserved. 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By following these conditions you are allowed to use and copy the content of this document. The conditions are: • If using (parts of) the content of this document, always refer to the authentic source. • If using (parts of) the content of this document, always mention the date of extraction. • For annotation mention the following: Designing a National Standard for Discovery Metadata, Improving Access to Digital Information in the Dutch Government Report written by RAND Europe (http://www.randeurope.nl), assisted by Gyata Management Consulting (http://www.gyata.nl) and Doxsupport (http://www.doxsupport.nl) On request of the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties; http://www.minbzk.nl/) Copyright by Stichting ICTU (http://www.ICTU.nl/) Management and Control by Advies Overheid.nl (http://advies.overheid.nl/) The Hague, August 2004 i Designing a national standard for discovery metadata RAND Europe Preface This report, prepared for and funded by the Advies Overheid.nl and the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK), presents the results of a short project on the use of metadata (i.e., information that describes other information) to enhance the transparency of government in the Netherlands. The purpose of this project was to evaluate the risks and issues involved in introducing a nationwide standard for metadata to describe online government information in the Netherlands and to propose such a standard, based on the Dublin Core (DC) metadata standard, which has served as the basis for a number of similar initiatives in other countries. In addition to this report on the project itself, a Handbook was developed to motivate and explain the proposed standard to the government information providers for whom it is intended. The research project began 22 April 2004 and was to be completed 30 September 2004. This report presents the results of our analysis, organized according to the three major phases in which the project was conducted. The first phase examined the needs of government information providers, to enable us to understand their concerns and what a metadata standard should offer them. The second phase examined the Dublin Core and a number of other national metadata standards, to enable us to understand their capabilities and limitations and to propose a discovery metadata standard for the Netherlands. The third phase explored implementation issues that had emerged in the first two phases. Our conclusions and recommendations are drawn from the results of all three of these phases. The report should be of interest to information providers, such as website and database managers in government organizations at all levels. The research was conducted by a consortium under the leadership of RAND Europe (Leiden, the Netherlands) and included Gyata Management Consulting (Rotterdam, Netherlands), Doxsupport (Oosthuizen, Netherlands) and the RAND headquarters office in Santa Monica, California, United States. RAND Europe is an independent not-for-profit policy research organization that serves the public interest by improving policymaking and informing public debate. Clients are European governments, institutions, and firms with a need for rigorous, impartial, multidisciplinary analysis of the hardest problems they face. This report has been peer- reviewed in accordance with RAND's quality assurance standards (see http://www.rand.org/about/standards/) and therefore may be represented as a RAND Europe product. For more information about this report, please contact: [email protected]. ii For more information about this project, please contact: Advies Overheid.nl ICTU Nieuwe Duinweg 24-26 2587 AD Den Haag P.O.Box 84011 2508 AA Den Haag The Netherlands +31 70 8887850 [email protected] For more information about RAND Europe, please contact: RAND Europe Newtonweg 1 2333 CP LEIDEN The Netherlands +31 721 524 51 51 [email protected] iii Contents Colophon......................................................................................................................i Preface..........................................................................................................................ii Summary.....................................................................................................................ix SECTION 1 Introduction .................................................................................... 1 SECTION 2 Definitions....................................................................................... 5 SECTION 3 Research Approach .......................................................................... 9 SECTION 4 Phase I: Analysis of Dutch government data and metadata needs ...................................................................................................... 13 4.1 The Dutch and EU contexts ............................................................................14 4.1.1 Dutch projects related to metadata......................................................14 4.1.2 The Dutch regulatory context .............................................................15 4.1.3 The EU context...................................................................................17 4.2 Intrinsic metadata issues...................................................................................19 4.2.1 Tailoring metadata to different needs ..................................................19 4.2.2 Communities of Interest, supported by a national clearinghouse .........20 4.2.3 Encoding schemes and controlled vocabularies....................................21 4.2.3.1 Geospatial encoding schemes...............................................................22 4.2.3.2 Encoding schemes for Subject keywords..............................................23