Getting on with Government 2.0 - Department of Finance and ...

and a signatory to the recommendation.) It recommends that member countries ‘in establishing
or reviewing their policies regarding access and use of public sector information … take due
account of and implement the following principles, which provide a general framework for the
wider and more effective use of public sector information and content and the generation of
new uses from it.’
The taskforce endorses the broad thrust of the principles but notes that there is a strong case for
greater prominence to be given to timeliness in these principles. It is common for information to
be locked up for far too long while it is brought into a state deemed acceptable for publication.
Where data will require further work to improve its quality there should be a strong presumption
that it should be released — together with clear declarations of any limitations in the quality
of the information and the ways in which this limits its usefulness. While there are no doubt
circumstances where the early release of data that will be subsequently revised could do more
harm than good, this will be rare.
The taskforce also considers that greater prominence can be given to the importance of
metadata to the effective release of PSI. Metadata is ‘data describing data’ and it is essential for
users wishing to ‘find, play or share’ it. Metadata can take many forms:
●●
●●
●●
Discovery metadata — describes a sufficient amount of the content of a resource to a
sufficient level of detail such that the resource can be discovered and used by anyone with
an interest in it. In its simplest form it might be just the title of a spreadsheet although to
maximise the chances of the resource being discovered, discovery metadata should be more
comprehensive and ideally follow a standard.
Quality metadata — enables potential users to make decisions about whether to use, or how
they should use, a resource. To maximise its utility, quality metadata should be presented in a
consistent way, if possible, for all available resources. This can be achieved by using a quality
framework to assess each resource. 207 Aspects of quality metadata can also be considered to
be discovery metadata.
Content metadata — enables a resource to be understood and used. At the highest level,
content metadata is consists of the super set of metadata that is required to enable a dataset
to stand on its own — metadata about the dataset itself as well as metadata about the actual
data that it contains. At the lowest level, content metadata describes each element in each
record in a dataset by specifying things such as name, format, length etc.
The more comprehensive the metadata, the more useful it is. However, providing comprehensive
metadata can be a time consuming and costly, particularly where internal information
management is in a poor state. The perfect can be the enemy of the good, 208 and this can lead
to unnecessary delays in the release of data. To overcome this, a ‘layered’ approach to metadata
can be adopted, where the first priority is to provide simpler metadata sets, building up to
more complete metadata as expertise is built up and as sophisticated information management
processes become established.
207 An example of such a framework is the ABS’s data quality framework, which can be accessed at
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/1520.0Main%20Features1May+2009 or
http://tinyurl.com/yd6owv7.
208 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Voltaire.
48
Engage: <strong>Getting</strong> on with Government 2.0 | report of the government 2.0 taskforce