RBU_JR_LIS_V23_2021-FULL_TEXT-E-Copy

RBU Journal of library & Information Science, V. 23, 2021
discoverability or helps determine suitability or
accessibility of a resource.
2.4 Australian Government Locator Service
(AGLS)
Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) metadata
standard is an Australian standard for cross-domain
resource description, consisting of nineteen elements
(National Archives of Australia, 2021). AGLS is also
based on the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set with 4
additional elements to describe the resources more
effectively. It contains different element qualifiers to
facilitate it to describe more categories of resources.
AGLS, which is interoperable and is entirely compatible
with the Dublin Core metadata element set. In order to
have resource compliance with AGLS standard, five
metadata elements such as creator, title, date, identifier
OR availability, subject OR function must be present.
The 'identifier' field is mandatory if the resource is in
online mode and 'availability' field is mandatory if the
resource is available only in offline mode. AGLS requires
'publisher' element to describe the information resources,
except for transactional services. All other elements are
optional, and all elements are repeatable (Abideen P. S.,
2011).
2.4 Indian Scenario
The Government of India also has taken initiatives in
metadata standardisation in India. The first working group
meeting constituted for ‘metadata and data standards for e-
Governance application domains’, was held in the
Documentation Research and Training Centre (DRTC),
Bangalore in June 2006.
Over a period of time, the Government of India has
notified domain-specific e-Governance related metadata
standards (e-Governance Standards Division, Govt. of
India, 2021).
Prominent among them include:
Metadata and Data Standards for Health Domain
Metadata and Data Standards for Panchayati Raj
Metadata and Data Standards for Rural Drinking
Water and Sanitation
Demographic Metadata and Data Standards
Biometrics Standards for Face image data,
Fingerprint image data and Iris image data.
Based on the study undertaken on the globally accepted e-
Government metadata standards, Abideen P. S., (2013)
proposed a model metadata framework for India, namely
Indian e-Governance Metadata Set Model (I-GMS)
'consisting of 18 elements with four mandatory fields such
as Creator, Date, Title, Subject, and three fields such as
Availability, Identifier and Publisher are mandatory based
on the types of resource. The remaining 11 elements are
optional. All elements are repeatable, and many elements
have qualifiers to specify the context of the data. The
model proposed by Abideen P. S., (2013), is compatible
with the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set.
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Metadata Interoperability
Interoperability is ‘the ability of two or more organizations
or systems to be engaged in the process of ensuring that
the organizations or systems exchange information and reuse
the information, internally or externally’ (Martins, P.
V., & Da Silva, A. R., 2008). The interoperability of e-
governance services are very important, in order to feel the
convenience of application of technology in the day today
life of the citizens. Different studies conducted by Madalli,
D. P. (2007), Bountouri et al., (2008), Charalabidis &
Askounis, (2008), Saekow & Boonmee, (2009), Ojo et al.,
(2009, 2010) are mainly pointing to the importance of
metadata standardisation for interoperability in e-
governance. Initiatives at the global and national level in
metadata standardization is a positive direction in e-
governance interoperability.
General issues in interoperability especially in the context
of India is being highlighted by Madalli, D. P., (2007).
These include:
Requirement for specific type of data sets, and
varying forms of interaction and delivery of services.
Variations in e-governance method form department
to department.
Disparity as different departments adopted e-
governance at different times and following the
standards and technologies that were available at that
time.
Disparity of cultural influences in approach to
information and its representation.
India having multi-lingual communities that warrants
cross lingual retrieval.
All of these reasons warrant that measures of
interoperability be implemented in e-governance system
(Madalli, D. P., 2007).
Since metadata schemas define the structure of the
metadata description, the data input to the e-governance
systems needs to be interoperable. It is being facilitated by
using the data encoding systems, which specify the rules
for vocabulary control, like in the case of an authority list
in a library database. Encoding schemes help remove
inconsistency in data entry by reducing the chance of using
variant or incorrect forms of the same data. Abideen P. S.,
(2011) illustrated a detailed description of encoding
systems used for metadata interoperability in various
countries. Once the standardized data is available, it will
be useful for the computers to analyze it, using various
technologies, including that of the semantic web.
Conclusions
Analysis of the budget documents of India (Ministry of
Finance, 2021) shows that government of India and state
governments are earmarking crores of rupees year after
year on e-governance projects in order to ensure
efficiency, transparency, and a better citizen-friendly
interface. To exchange data between these e-governance