E-Government Metadata Standard

What Does E-Government Metadata Standard Mean?

The E-Government Metadata Standard (e-GMS) is a metadata standard for making data handling consistent, in order to promote efficient use of Web pages and documents. It is a standard of the U.K. government, under the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, and is part of the E-government Interoperability Framework set up in the early years of the millennium to promote universal standards across national lines.

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Techopedia Explains E-Government Metadata Standard

Metadata standards seek to create a consistent use of various types of metadata. Governments have created their own standards to handle data consistency in many fields. The e-GMS does this in the U.K.; materials from the National Archive state that the e-GMS is “meant as an overall standard, a superset of all elements and refinements needed throughout the U.K. public sector.”

Within the e-GMS, each element has a level of obligation: mandatory, mandatory if applicable, recommended or optional. The standard also deals with accessibility, addressing, aggregation and other issues by creating field labels such as contributors and audiences. It uses the idea of “refinements” to qualify data and create consistent and universal processes for the use of metadata across the digital community.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…