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TAGS - Thesaurus of Australian Government Subjects - Checkpoints for Portals

Introduction

To assess the best method for using TAGS in an agency's website or portal a number of factors need to be considered. These include:

• The needs of a website's customer group;
• The website's method of accessing metadata through the Australian Government metadata repository; and
• The maturity of the website's existing navigation paths.

The major navigation paths in a website/portal are built upon the needs of the target customer group, and generally include more than the subject or topic-based browsing that TAGS supports. However, even though there are many different approaches a customer may make when searching, a thesaurus such as TAGS or an agency's own specialist thesaurus can be used to improve the ease of navigation within a website as the possibility of entering a "wrong" term is decreased significantly. It is hoped that by increasing flexibility in the use of terminology the amount of unsuccessful searches will be significantly reduced and thus the ease of use of the website/portal for an agency's customers will be increased.

If an agency wishes to discuss any aspect of these guidelines and the best approach for their website/portal please contact us.

What is the benefit to the Portals?

TAGS has been designed to provide standard information which can allow the resources listed in a portal to be searched by other portals, either directly or by navigating through synonyms. Even though different terms may be used across portals for the same concept, TAGS maps them together as synonyms. This allows not only an increased consistency in metadata across portals but increased customer focus in the presentation of Australian Government resources.

How can an agency access TAGS?

TAGS is available in two formats, a plain text file in CSV and a browse and print version in PDF.

What is the Scheme name?

The official scheme name for the thesaurus is TAGS. HTML example:

<META NAME="DC.Subject" SCHEME="TAGS" CONTENT="Drug abuse; Prevention">

How do agencies choose how to use TAGS?

TAGS can assist with management and presentation of content of a website and will enable an agency to improve navigation functions in its website. The thesaurus can support both browse and search functions. By promoting consistency in metadata creation TAGS encourages consistency in results provided to users.

Agencies should:

• Consider using a subset of TAGS, which contain only those terms relevant to the scope of a portal. Concepts that are broadly related to each other are grouped into subject categories. The Subject categories are:

There are two additional categories, PE Persons and PR Processes that provide useful groupings for general terms.

• which generally correspond to the scope of the subject-based portals. Customer group portals of a general nature, such as the Regional portal, will probably find they will have to implement the entire scope of TAGS.
• Consider using TAGS to help create the filter to identify relevant resources when importing metadata from the main repository. Other AGLS elements such as Audience, Type and Function are also valuable for this purpose.
• Consider mapping an agency's specialist thesaurus to relevant areas of TAGS. This mapping is then used to relate terms "behind the scenes" for retrieval of resources, or to help create a filter to identify resources relevant to a website.
• Consider using TAGS directly or as a "behind the scenes" tool.

Can TAGS support browsing?

Agencies should:

• Consider using the thesaurus to help create a browsable list for a website. TAGS is a rich source of terms for an agency's browse hierarchy - it provides a good overview of the concepts in use in government metadata and websites. It may provide all the terms that an agency needs for subject-based browsing. It is possible to generate a browse list automatically from a thesaurus.
• The Australian Government Health portal, HealthInsite, shows how a thesaurus can be integrated into a website browse display. HealthInsite's Topics Map [] works by searching on the code for the displayed thesaurus term.
• Consider using TAGS to automatically allocate items to categories in the browse hierarchy. One way to do this would be to implement an automatic mapping scheme that maps TAGS terms to the appropriate term in a browse hierarchy. For example:
  • The Agriculture portal resource management category has the term "Forests". Subject metadata uses several terms that relate to this, such as Forests, line">Forest management and Forestry. By creating a mapping of these terms records containing any of these terms in Subject metadata can be automatically linked to the "Forests' category as they are added to the portal repository.
• Consider using TAGS to support the delivery of browse through a dynamic search of the metadata repository. For example:
  • The Women's portal may have the browse category "Equal employment opportunity', which equates to Employment equity in TAGS and therefore Subject metadata. Behind the category "Equal employment opportunity" is a dynamic search to the Australian Government metadata repository. This search looks for the values: "Women in AGLS.Audience" and "Employment equity in DC.Subject".

Can TAGS support searching?

TAGS can be used to enhance the search function of a website. It is structured - allowing an agency to automatically expand or restrict the scope of a query. TAGS can be used to navigate users to the most relevant concept, or it can be integrated into the search engine to expand the scope of a query.

Agencies should:

• Consider using a thesaurus to guide a user searching on a general term to a more specific concept. For example:
  • A customer may be looking for information on residential aged care. If they go to the Seniors portal they may search for "residential". Displaying the nearest result in TAGS would lead the user from "Residential facilities" to "Nursing homes" and to the related term "Aged care".
• Consider using a thesaurus to ensure a more comprehensive result by executing a search on the term used plus its synonyms and narrower terms:
  • Using the same example, the customer may search for "residential care". The integrated thesaurus would translate this query to the preferred term "residential facilities" and supplement it with "Nursing homes" and any synonyms such as "Institutional care". It is necessary to include synonyms to retrieve records that do not use TAGS terms in Subject, or if the search is a more general keyword search.
• Consider that if a search returns no results the thesaurus can be used to expand the search further, for example by including or suggesting related terms.
• Consider using the website search engine to suggest general terms from the thesaurus to ensure comprehensive results. For example the searcher obtains a hit due to the presence of the search term in the metadata Description element, but not in the Subject element. The search engine then checks the values of Subject and suggests to the searcher that he/she may wish to see other metadata records bearing the same values. The same logic can be applied to values in the Function element.

Can TAGS deliver better result sets?

Agencies should:

• Consider using metadata to improve discoverability. Results obtained from matches to terms in the Subject element can be viewed as more relevant than returns on searching for a keyword in the Description or a fulltext index. This information can be used to determine ranking of a result set.

Contact for information on this page: webpublishing@finance.gov.au

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