Occurrences

Paper

../papers/02-00-02/02-00-02.html

Date of Presentation

Tuesday, 21 May

Time of Presentation

09.45

Presentation Level

High-Level

Abstract

During 2000 and 2001, more than 60 national parliaments and legislative assemblies across the world responded favourably to a call for participation in the development of a common XML vocabulary for the markup of legislative and parliamentary texts, 'ParlML'. Despite the initial enthusiasm and a clear need and demand for such an initiative, the road to establishing a standard has been paved with problems and concerns. Alongside this, a separate initiative - looking initially to build on the UK Government's e-Government Interoperability Framework (eGIF)- got under way to propose a European Union-wide framework for metadata and use of XML standards, 'MIReG' (Managing Information Resources for e-Government). Both ParlML and MIReG explicitly focus their information architectures on the 'XML family' of standards. ParlML started out as an ambitious call for cooperation in the development of an explicit XML vocabulary for the markup of parliamentary and legislative texts. Following a first face-to-face seminar, and limits on financial and human resources available, the agreement was to scale down the initial ambitions and concentrate on exchanges of best practices in use of XML within parliaments and seek cooperation on specific projects and joint RFPs and RFCs. One area that will be pursued actively regards production and standardisation of XML metadata wrapping of otherwise heterogeneous content. This will be done together with investigations of the use of the Eurovoc multilingual Thesaurus and emerging ontology tools around Topic Maps, XTM and RDF. MIReG started life as a seminar bringing together participants from the European Parliament, the UK e-Envoy's Office, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, the European Standardisation Committee (CEN) and the European Commission's 'Interchange of Data between Administrations' (IDA) programme. This seminar resulted in MIReG being setup and supported by these bodies with seed funding from IDA. It is scoped to look not only at developing a common metadata framework for the European Union's public administrations but also vocabulary control and other encoding schemes, ontologies and topic maps, software interfaces and best practice guidelines. Both projects highlight the need for high-level, management-driven, cooperation and the scale of consideration and decision-making needed upstream from technology and implementation questions: agreement on metadata elements, encoding schemes and application profiles; agreement on semantic equivalence of document types and 'information chunks' from different institutions and in different languages; agreement on ontologies; angreement on Thesauri descriptors... Although the XML standards provide the mechanisms for addressing all of these issues, the questions needed to be posed by and answered by, a constellation of managers rarely before involved in these issues. How the XML family of standards is introduced in the public sector will have important consequences for government relations with business and citizens.