Categorization of Government Information (CGI) Working Group\
of the Interagency Committee on Government Information

# Eighth Meeting, May 24, 2004 at White House Conference Center, Washington DC

##### CGI Members attending

> Chair (Eliot Christian, USGS)
>
> Office of Intergovernmental Solutions (Susan Turnbull, GSA)
>
> Superintendent of Documents (TC Evans, GPO)
>
> Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (Susan Healy, US Courts)
>
> Federal librarians (Gretchen Schlag, Navy and Richard Huffine, EPA)

Federal Enterprise Architecture (Eliot Christian, USGS)

> CENDI (Jim Erwin, DTIC)
>
> FGDC (Eliot Christian, USGS)
>
> ICGI Electronic Records WG liaison (Susan Sullivan, NARA)
>
> ICGI Content Management WG liaison (Joann McGovern, GSA), by telephone

##### Others attending

> Marcia Christian, USGS (telephone)
>
> Rob Davies, ePSINET
>
> Andy Hoskinson, IAC
>
> Brand Niemann, EPA (telephone)
>
> Mary Rowlatt, ePSINET
>
> Sahar Taman, Navy

1.  The Working Group approved the previously distributed notes from the
    May 10, 2004 meeting.

```{=html}
<!-- -->
```
1.  Attendees of the meeting, in person and by telephone, introduced
    themselves.

2.  A scheduled presentation was given by Mary Rowlatt and Rob Davies of
    the U.K. about the E-content initiative, ePSINet (European Public
    Sector Information Network) http://www.epsigate.org/ . Mary said
    that EPSINet represents 25 member states following a directive
    legislated on December 31, 2003. Within that framework she has a
    target date of January, 2005 to have UK information available
    on-line. Their driving motive is to be socially inclusive and to
    empower people. The project is driven by market support in order to
    be affordable, seeks to be scalable and based on international
    standards. They are using a modified Dublin Core, including a
    variety of encoding schemes. Some issues discussed were: (1)
    confusion between categories and \"keywords\", (2) metadata search
    capability, (3) development across all areas of government is
    patchy, (4) use of terms across communities, (5) public capacity for
    complexity, and (6) need for good quality metadata and upkeep. She
    explained their change management process and also gave examples of
    more local projects (Scotland is digitizing museum artifacts; Learn
    Direct for public sector training). Overall, she said they are
    encouraging the Europeans to adopt something more like the American
    model. They are promoting mandates, restrained by caution.

3.  Susan Sullivan of NARA reported on activities of the ICGI Electronic
    Records Policy Working Group (ERPWG). She said that June 9th was
    when the group would discuss the revised report on Barriers.
    Concerning lessons learned; she said that they were asked to focus
    on root cause more than details. There will be a \"straw man\"
    release of metadata elements used.

4.  Joann McGovern of GSA reported on activities of the ICGI Content
    Management Working. She said her group met last week. The document
    will go to ICGI executive committee today. The Subject Taxonomy
    group has been evaluating 35 large federal websites to get standards
    of categorization for improving FirstGov taxonomy. (Huffine suggests
    they get public input).

5.  Gretchen Schlag reported progress on the CGI WG activity to define
    open, interoperable standards for categorizing Government
    information. She said they are going to OMB today and have no
    feedback yet. Some parts of their work came from the search
    interoperability work. They accepted the definition of categorizable
    government information. They removed a definition for levels of
    categorizing because that is in the GPO document. Perhaps there
    could be an article about the \"levels of granularity\". They do
    address issues of quality and give credit to libraries and GPO for
    work already done. They did not identify new stakeholders. There was
    discussion about when to indicate a unique field identifying a
    document or level of changed document. The broader issue is one of
    context and time dimension in order to categorize changing documents
    or collections. (Eliot suggested that it is important to define
    information objects outside of whether the technology to handle the
    concept exits today.) Discussion also addressed intellectual
    property rights.

6.  Eliot Christian of USGS reported on the CGI WG activity to define
    open, interoperable standards for electronic searching. He
    recommended that the government adopt the search standard ISO 23950
    to achieve broad scale interoperability. The cost of pursuing
    interoperability in this way in miniscule compared to the costs
    associated with search overall. (There was a discussion about
    \"plug-ins\" and query language and vendors.) There was some talk
    about persistent identifiers such as used by DOD. The ultimate
    decision probably goes to the Agency, not a government wide policy.
    Eliot walked through various approaches to interoperability:
    portals, common data model, applications programming interface,
    structured query language, and abstract modeling.

7.  Jim Erwin reported progress on the CGI WG activity to define
    searchable identifiers. He said he is awaiting pre-clearance from
    OMB.

8.  TC Evans reported progress on the CGI WG activity to define which
    government information should be categorized. He said the
    recommendation will be forthcoming.

9.  The chair took updates of product target dates on the Work Plan for
    the CGI WG, based on best estimates from the four leaders of the CGI
    WG activities (Gretchen, Eliot, Jim, and TC).

10. The next meeting of the CGI Working Group will be held June 7, from
    9:00-11:00 at the White House Conference Center.