Taxonomy and Metadata

Organising the council’s information into a set of categories that can be shuffled, filtered, navigated and sorted to fit the users’ needs.

An single taxonomy should be adopted, or developed, in order to be able to categorise and organise all of the organisations’ activity and information. The taxonomy should be straightforward, plain speaking and use terms that are accessible to the public rather than jargon and acronyms.

Not only this, but its use must be encouraged consistently across the organisation with a range of promotional activities, posters, card sorting workshops, online quizzes, and so forth.

Information Architecture

Information Architecture principles should be defined to allow future web properties to be built with some consistency.

It would be impractical to attempt to define the information architecture for all of the websites and systems that a Local Authority will need now and in the future. Therefore information architecture guidelines should be designed that include the methods, mechanisms and information used to create the user journeys for any associated website. This should include practical aspects, such as navigation, information consistency, search results and links to related content; but also provide the reasoning behind the principles to allow them to be flexibly applied in future updates.

Common navigation tool

Joining up many websites with a consistent way to find your way around them.

In order to present the many different Local Authority web properties as a coherent family of sites, a common set of navigation tools should be provided.  These tools should provide: some element of common branding; a link to the main Local Authority website; a set of top level navigation links to other websites and commonly used facilities; links to timely information; and a common search tool.

The tool should be managed centrally in order that changes to the links can be kept up to date and to reduce the cost of making any changes across the entire family of sites.

Connect the external digital community

Allowing services built and managed by the Local Authority to be used by individuals or groups within the digital community will benefit all parties.  Services such as taxonomy and localised gazetteer suggesters will allow local newspapers, bloggers, forums and hyperlocal websites to relate their content directly to Local Authority content and services.

In addition to simply allowing links to form between the web systems in the region, the Local Authority must foster greater connections between them allowing them to find opportunities to share with each other to mutual benefit.

Semantic & location connectio

Information can be connected by its subject matter and any associated locations. This is about more than just keywords and postcodes.  Through good semantic analysis, content can be appropriately mapped to the Local Authority’s taxonomy no matter where it comes from.

The same applies to geo-locating information.  Not all information can be efficiently geo-tagged at the point of its creation but effective geo-analysis would allow all location information to be derived (with the aid of a local gazetteer and other location reference sources).  This metadata should then become available to any system that can deliver more value to the user by presenting connected information.