Comments by
Mike Nelson
The metadata data model is quite an old definition of RDF. It is more correctly a general method for machine-readable conceptual description or modeling of information and knowledge representation.
This doesn’t quite match the W3C definition. Fundamentally, the Semantic Web is a web of data. It provides “a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries”. A key missing word is intelligent software agents.
After paragraph 788, insert definition for Web 3.0 as a synonym for Semantic web.
Open Office XML -> Office Open XML
@Geoff Mason, you cannot ignore paragraph 652. You cannot simply gloss over the fact that when you put something on Facebook you agree to submit to the personal jurisdiction of the courts located in Santa Clara County, California and agree to personal information being transmitted to the United States.
If I’m making a submission to a public inquiry in Australia, I want my personal information protected by the Privacy Act with the full force of Australian courts behind it.
There is also a lot of repetition.
“important for agencies to use open file formats” – use of ODF should be mandatory for general office applications.
“cultural change in the APS” – not all government employees are APS.
Minor typo: Europen -> European.
Computers have only become entrenched in day to day government activities for the last 20 or so years and in some specialised scientific areas for maybe 40 years. This means there is another 60-80 years worth of PSI that exists only on paper, like the historic newspapers. There should be a recommendation for proactive scanning and digitisation by OCR of historic PSI still on paper and open this to public error correction. For example Hansard or Royal Commissions prior to the 1980s.
The Taskforce should recommend that PSI be created in open formats where possible, i.e. use ODF as standard for general word processing instead of DOC. The national governments of Belgium, Brazil, Croatia, Denmark, France, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia and South Africa, and many more regional/state governments and municipalities around the world, have mandated the use of ODF (ISO 26300) and PDF/A (ISO 19005) for reading, publishing and information exchange.
open standards, open source software and open formats
Second point should be “based on open standards and open file formats”.
Second point should be “based on open standards and open file formats”.
Not all government employees are public servants. This also doesn’t take into account that a fair amount of “implementation” has been outsourced to private contractors.
Good point. There are also government employees who are not public servants.
This is why it is extremely dangerous to be using commercial third party sites like Facebook and Twitter to get feedback on public policy. They may have the name and critical mass but they are outside Australian law and making a copy of something on those sites if you need it as a “record” could actually be a breach of copyright!
Interactive media is all well and good, but it must not be on commercial sites outside Australia. The Facebooks and Twitters of the world are not subject to Australian law.
The COAG treatment makes sense as a fair amount of PSI resides in state government agencies. Ideally all should work to the same set of technical standards. We don’t want a repeat of the railway gauge problem.
International collaboration it essential, including greater involvement in W3C and ISO processes. Otherwise we will just end up reinventing the wheel or come up with something incompatible with the rest of the world.
data.gov.au is an excellent idea. The recommendation should note that any PSI made available through such a portal must have metadata in RDF. AGLS is the obvious standard to use.
WCAG 2.0 is a complete dog’s breakfast. Intellectually interesting but impossible to implement in the real world. Compliance is not complex, it is outright impossible!