Citation
Rowlatt, M. and Allcock, M. (2002), "Delivering joined-up access to local and national information in the United Kingdom", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No. 9. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2002.23919iaf.002
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2002, MCB UP Limited
Delivering joined-up access to local and national information in the United Kingdom
Mary Rowlatt and Mark Allcock
The early developments and goals of seamlessUK (http://www.seamless-uk.info/seamlessuk.info/gensub_about.htm) are described in this article as well as the relationships with its partners and providers.
Meeting the challenge of 2005
seamlessUK is a development of the Seamless project in Essex, which provided a step towards an online community network. However, seamlessUK aims to build on this precedent and work with national information providers as well as locally based sources to provide a national structure of community information portals, a citizen's gateway. This ambitious new project aims to set a standard across the UK for categorising and cataloguing a range of public sector information for the general public using controlled and shared vocabulary to improve precision, relevance and user friendliness. National information sources already signed up to be a part of the project include Age Concern, BBC, Learndirect, NHS online, UK Online and the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux, among others. Through this citizen's gateway, the public will be able to access this information alongside local information from local authorities, voluntary organisations, libraries and medical centres. For example, people will have the means to search for information on a particular illness, such as meningitis, on the NHS online service alongside the local support groups or local medical centres in their area in a single search.
The UK government requires all local authorities to make services available online where appropriate by 2005 and to meet government interoperability standards to achieve this. A consortium of local authorities led by Essex County Council launched seamlessUK in March 2002 together with Fretwell-Downing Informatics (FDI) (an information management provider in the library sphere – (http://www.fdusa.com/fdusa.html) and MDR Partners (project management specialists) (http://www.mdrpartners.com/IE/home.htm). seamlessUK will provide a public information search portal designed to make accessing local and national information online quick and efficient for the general public, while meeting all e-government standards set for central and local government.
How technology helps
seamlessUK will be available to the general public initially via a PC and the Web from home, in libraries and other community access points – the service will then be rolled out via multiple delivery channels such as kiosks and handheld devices at a later date.
Using FDI's citizens' information portal software, the user will search Web sites and database records at the same time – providing a single set of results. This will supply a deeper level of integration than high-level hypertext links, which are the usual means of basic Web navigation. seamlessUK's aim is to provide portals that can join up multiple, distributed data sources, providing a single point of access for the public user. To harmonise the varying influences of the information providers involved, the seamlessUK project has produced an application profile based on Dublin Core for which FDI has developed a metadata creation tool. The tool will help participating information providers describe their Web sources more easily and reliably to a national standard and is linked to the seamlessUK thesaurus.
A national thesaurus for citizens' information
The thesaurus is being developed as part of the project and offers a set of domain-specific terms and relationships to supply an overall chart of the information sphere; for example, some regions use the term "refuse collectors" while others often use the name "dustbin men". The key issue for the formation of a usable thesaurus is that it is a controlled list to help data providers generate consistent metadata for their resources and will ultimately provide more precise metadata usage and indexing, improving the precision, relevance and user-friendliness of current Web-based searching. It will eventually link into, and map between, other established thesauri.
The seamlessUK project, using FDI's software, has set metadata standards other councils will be able to use to catalogue local information sources. The solution allows "legacy" data to be leveraged into an XML environment by converting existing schemata to XML-based record structures on the fly.
All the local portals in seamlessUK will be linked together – enabling the pooling of shared data. This will facilitate public access to the widest range of information resources – in effect a national virtual catalogue. The software provides simultaneous searching of numerous sources – structured databases, Web sites, XML, and Z39.50 sources and so on. The general public will receive search results in a clear and easily accessible fashion. This will include Web links to the original source of the information. The seamlessUK solution internally converts the data structures into XML schemata while retaining the richness of the native data structure, meaning information catalogued and classified in differing formats can be searched and retrieved easily, without the end user having to master differing system interfaces.
Putting the e-GIF and e-GMS into practice
FDI's technology has been designed to be scalable to very large numbers of both users and search objectives, making it possible for the system to provide a nation-wide search. The project complies with all the latest electronic Government Information Framework (e-GIF) and electronic Government Metadata Standard (e-GMS) and should become a major part of the government's ambitions for a joined-up society. e-GIF sets out the government's technical policies and standards for achieving interop-erability across all government departments and the wider public sector. It also gives the framework for seamless data flow and integration for inter- and intra-departmental systems. The UK e-GIF is a fundamental policy framework for the e-government strategy, and it delivers the crucial pre-requisites for inter-working between departments, the integration of departmental services and their delivery to the citizen and business as a joined-up service. seamlessUK is a pioneering project putting the e-GIF into practice by seamlessly joining up national and local providers from central, local, and regional government bodies/data providers and local information providers. The e-GMS is the standard that prescribes the use of XML and their attendant data type definitions for the exchange of data between systems.
Additional technology will be added in later phases of the project to provide GIS (geographical information systems) to allow searching by place, regardless of any boundaries, possibly using an intuitive map-based search and retrieval interface. This will enable proximity-based searching with accuracy ensured by use of a controlled-term gazetteer. This will enable people to access information from a neighbouring borough or county from within their own local portal.
seamlessUK will conform with current national and international accessibility standards, specifically those mandated by the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) and the W3C. Ongoing surveying of user interaction with the system will ensure that the portals will be of the highest possible value across participating communities. Free access for the citizen in libraries will also ensure a high level of social inclusion and reduce the problems caused by rural isolation or lack of access to information and communications technologies. The information will also ultimately be available in several languages in addition to English.
How lottery funding has made this possible
Funding for the project was awarded to Essex County Council from the NOF, a Lottery Distributor created to award grants to health, education and environment projects throughout the UK. The funding was awarded under its digitisation programme, intended to support the creation of useful information and resources for the People's Network – the initiative to link all public libraries to the Internet. Project leaders anticipate that this will provide funding for the first two years of the project, and are now investigating sustainability. The project leaders felt there would be very little point in producing a solution for the general public without a sustainable plan for the future. One idea is that money to maintain the project will come from the installation of a national seamless UK partnership – the citizen's access to the information will remain completely free of charge.
Making seamlessUK available to all
The service can be implemented on an authority-by-authority basis with each authority having the freedom to choose the information resources they wish to bring together. Once live, the service will be available to over six million citizens, i.e. 10 per cent of the population. Current partners are Essex, Lewisham, Bexley, Brighton and Hove, Bromley, East Sussex, Kent, Medway, and North Lincolnshire. The partners are keenly seeking new members to participate in the national seamlessUK partnership from early 2003 as the project rolls out. The seamlessUK partnership will highlight an example of a successful private and public enterprise and provide a usable source for citizens all over the UK to plug into national and local information from their homes or local libraries.
Mary Rowlatt (maryr@essexcc.gov.uk) is Community Network Co-ordinator andMark Allcock(mark.allcock@fdgroup.com) is FDI Product Manager, both with Essex County Council.