Here is another article on current thinking on the utility of the Government Information Locator Service (GILS).
- OMB mulls evolving beyond GILS, By Jason Miller, Government Computer News 11/07/05.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently issued an RFI (Efficient and Effective Information Retrieval and Sharing) asking vendors for ideas for more “efficient and effective information retrieval and sharing.”
The article notes that agencies have been using GILS sparingly over the last decade and that “OMB is asking whether technology has surpassed GILS, which officials said relies on metadata tagging, and whether there is something that is less costly and more effective for searching the mounds of government data.”
This article quotes Eliot Christian, a data and information systems manager at the Geological Survey, as saying that tagging is one aspect of metadata, but is not what GILS is focused on: “GILS says we ought to have interoperable search, but it never required metadata tagging.” The article also quotes Kurt Sanford, president and chief executive officer for Lexis Nexis U.S. Corporate and Federal Markets, as saying that the RFI “could quite possibly be the most important e-government initiative envisioned to date.”
See also: Will Full Text Search Replace Cataloging?.
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