Celebrating 10 Years of Government of Canada Metadata Standards

Abstract

As the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative celebrates its 15th anniversary, the Government of Canada (GC) celebrates its 10th year of making information easier to find. The Government of Canada officially adopted the Dublin Core as its core metadata standard for Web resource discovery in 2001. Soon the Government of Canada started to develop domain-specific metadata beyond Web and resource discovery to meet wider information needs. Supported by standards and other policy instruments, rapid metadata developments were made in the areas of records management, Web content management, e-learning, executive correspondence and geospatial data. The Government of Canada has been an active participant in the DC-Government Working Group, and organized its own event, the Canadian Metadata Forum in 2003 and 2005. More recently, the Government of Canada has adopted an enterprise information architecture (EIA) approach to metadata, within a larger information management strategy. The Government of Canada now has plans underway to develop other metadata domains, registries and repositories, its own namespace facility, and a vast awareness campaign to brand metadata as the “DNA of Government”.