The e-GMS (e-Government Metadata Standard) is a set of metadata that can be recorded and published for UK Government records.  The metadata standard is part of a larger project:

The e-GIF outlines the policies and technical standards that facilitate interoperability and communication within UK Government systems (and therefore recommends such technologies as HTTP, XML, etc.).  As part of this, the e-GMS defines standard metadata fields that can be used to locate and identify resources.

More information on e-GIF and e-GMS can be found at:

http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemasstandards/metadata.asp

e-GMS Details

The e-GMS metadata fields are based largely on Qualified Dublin Core metadata (http://www.dublincore.org).  Approximately 6 additional elements have been added to the Dublin Core set, to allow for government-specific information (e.g. Mandate, Preservation).

Due to the relatively large number of e-GMS fields, the standard acts more as a ‘superset’, from which each site/organisation can produce ‘application profiles’ – their own metadata subsets, comprising of e-GMS fields.

To this end – to aid interoperability amongst the differing application profiles – a core set of mandatory fields has been set.  On top of this, the ‘e-GMS for Web Sites’ standard specifies that the core mandatory set – within web sites – contains slightly more fields:

• Accessibility
• Creator
• Date
• Identifier
• Publisher
• Subject
• Title

One of these fields, ‘Subject’, contains an additional requirement.  The value of the subject should contain at least one entry from the Government Category List (GCL - http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemasstandards/gcl.asp).

e-GMS in Amaxus

The e-GMS standard is largely covered by default within Amaxus, as Amaxus contains data entry fields for most Dublin Core metadata elements.  Some additional (e-GMS specific) fields have been added to the metadata table to allow for e-GMS specific data (e.g. update frequency), so that Amaxus Users can enter values for these fields.

To fully comply with the e-GMS standard, the recorded metadata should be included in all HTML output, embedded as META tags within the HTML header.

Amaxus produces the HTML meta tags within the common XSLT file.

All the mandatory fields are output to HTML.  Additional e-GMS fields can be added to the output when required.