AGLS Metadata

AGLS (Australian Government Locator Service) is an Australian metadata standard (AS5044) for supporting consistent discovery of a range of information resources held by government agencies. AGLS was endorsed by the Online Council in 1998. It has been adopted by Commonwealth Government agencies and most State Governments, with some uptake by local government. Similar metadata standards are being implemented internationally.

As a member of the Online Council, NSW has agreed to adopt the AGLS metadata standard to support the discovery of online services. The GCIO Guideline Providing Information and Services Using the Internet recommends its use. However, AGLS can be used to support the discovery of a far broader range of information than that available through Internet web pages.

AGLS provides supporting descriptions about the owners, content, context and structure of resources. A resource may include web pages, documents (both online and physical), services offered by an agency, people, physical objects such as buildings or artefacts, and graphical resources such as maps or photographs. These resources can exist in different forms, for example:

• An html/xml resource eg, web page;
• A non-html/xml resource eg, PDF document, MS-Word file;
• A non-text resource such as an image, a map or a spatial data-set;
• An off-line resource eg, oil painting, over-the-counter service;
• Person within an organisation.

Agency adoption of AGLS as a broadly-applicable metadata standard provides for consistent discovery of this range of resources across many different environments. Six key reasons for using AGLS-style resource discovery metadata, are to support:

1. Consistent discovery of resources within agencies;
2. Discovery non-HTML Web resources;
3. Online discovery of services and physical resources not accessible via the Web;
4. Automation of the construction of Web portals;
5. Standard discovery of resources across agencies and jurisdictions;
6. More sophisticated searching for information resources.