Subject: Re: The Policy of GILS
Dan Schneider (schneidd@usdoj.gov)
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 18:47:37 -0400 (EDT)
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 18:47:37 -0400 (EDT) From: Dan Schneider <schneidd@usdoj.gov> To: Multiple recipients of list <gils@cni.org> Subject: Re: The Policy of GILS In-Reply-To: <199808101824.LAA18160@rs6a.wln.com> Message-Id: <Pine.NEB.3.95.980811181155.22449B-100000@sleepy.usdoj.gov>
On Mon, 10 Aug 1998, Philip Coombs <pcoombs@wln.com> wrote:
>
> I agree with Dan. May I wade in with some thoughts?
>
> It is easy to see the nuts and bolts but not the overall value of the
> machine. GILS was created for one purpose: to provide access to the
> public to government information.
>
> It wasn't created to promote a technology, protocol, or schema. These are
> things we imposed on GILS to "make it work". Well, I don't think we have
> achieved what we set out to do. The public did not say "We have too much
> information available and not enough structure!" I believe a lack of
> information content is the issue.
I appreciate Mr. Coombs' support and thoughtful comments. At the risk
of some over-simplification, let me expand a bit on my previous msg.
Based on five years of GILS-watching, I believe that:
Apart from the important issue of data base understanding, access, and
re-use, which I believe warrants its own treatment, and is in fact being
treated in many metadata-effort venues, I see the GILS issue from a
Public Policy perspective as boiling down to one Goal and one
Constraint.
The Goal is, as I stated previously, to enable any person or enterprise
to send one subject-matter inquiry at one time to one place, independent
of agency, and receive back a relevancy-ranked hit list of all items
meeting the search criteria, from all agencies, across the entire
Federal Government.
The Constraint is that the effort required by each agency to enable this
be seen by each agency as (1) being significant to the accomplishment of
the core, central mission(s) for which the agency exists, and (2) being
a cost-beneficial expenditure of agency funds. In other words, a sound
investment, good payback, positive ROI, etc.
As it now exists, for many Federal agencies, GILS is not perceived as
meeting that goal and satisfying that constraint.
I believe that a different, Web-based construct can meet the goal
and satisfy the constraint. During the coming weeks I anticipate
documenting that strategy in connection with some interagency
architectural endeavors. For now, I think that the key is to move
away from a catalog-bibliographic orientation that is based on the
traditional library science model. I believe that the digital
cyberspace age of electronic multimedia information objects requires
a new model. I don't know what that model may be, and it may not yet
have been devised, but I'm ready to let go of the old model and venture
forth on a different path.
Dan Schneider
Washington, DC
<schneidd@usdoj.gov>
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