REPORT ON GOVERNMENT WORKING GROUP BREAKOUT SESSIONS AT TOKYO WORKSHOP &
CONFERENCE

The DC-Government Working Group (WG) met in two breakout session during the
DC Workshop in Tokyo to review work accomplished to date, and to agree on
the 2001-2002 work agenda. The first session was held in the afternoon of
Monday 22 October 2001 with about 20 participants with the following
agenda:
1. Introduction and background
2. DCGov extension proposal
3. Further extension issues - records management elements, and describing
services
4. Searching for Government information on the Web - Maewyn Cumming (UK)

After a brief introduction and background from the chair, the session
reviewed the work accomplished in the last year, ie. the survey of
government implementations and projects using DC metadata; and the
development of the Government application profile which was submitted to
the DC Usage Board (UB) the week before the Workshop. The UB considered the
application profile at its meeting on Sunday 21 October 2001 and Andy
Powell from the UB attended the Government breakout session to explain the
thinking behind the UB's comments. The main features of the application
profile
were outlined to the meeting and Andy then discussed the UB's views on the
additional qualifiers proposed. The UB had rejected some of the proposals -
primarily on the basis that they did not support resource discovery -
and asked the WG to resubmit the others with fuller explanations and
examples. In some cases, the UB encouraged the WG to consider the use of
encoding schemes rather than additional qualifiers.

The meeting discussed the issues raised by Andy and the UB and decided that
a second
breakout session would be held on the following day to discuss what would be
done. The
discussion also considered what needed to be included in an application
profile. This first
session also discussed the possibility of holding another survey, since the
response
from the first survey had been so low. Maewyn Cumming mentioned that the
MIReG group would
be conducting their own survey in late 2001 or early 2002 and the Government
WG could possibly make use of the information gathered in this process. The
participants agreed that this offer should be accepted and discussed
further with Maewyn. There was a brief discussion on the need for a records
management metadata element set and whether the Government Working Group
was the right forum for this. The need for such an element set was
acknowledged, and
there was discussion on the relationship between records management
metadata, resource management metadata, and administrative metadata.
There will need to be further discussions between the WG chairs and the
Advisory Committee and the Executive to determine how or whether to
proceed. The session finished before Item 4 could be discussed.

The second breakout session was held on Tuesday 23 October 2001 with about
8 participants. Stuart Sutton, the Usage Board shepherd for the Government
application profile proposal, attended to discuss specific issues with
individual proposals for additional qualifiers. The meeting discussed the
UB comments and worked through the qualifiers which had been rejected and
those asked to be resubmitted. Participants agreed on necessary actions to
prepare the proposal for resubmission. This session also disucssed the issue
of
describing government services using DC based metadata. It was noted that
service discovery and desciption is central to most electronic government
programmes, and yet there is little agreement on the definition of terms
such as service, activity or function. The WG decided
to prepare a paper setting out the functional requirements for the
description
of services. This should be ready by the end of the first quarter of 2002.
A power point presentation summarising the results of the discussion is also
available.

As a result of discussions at both breakout sessions the Working Group
agreed to the following deliverables for the coming 12 months:
1. Survey of Government implementations or projects using DC-based metadata
2. Reworking and resubmission of the Government application profile
3. Discussions with the AC concerning the proposal to develop a records
management metadata set
4. Drafting of a paper on requirements for describing government services
using DC metadata


Andrew Wilson, Palle Aagaard
Chairs
DC-Government Working Group