"In a federated environment like we have here, each agency will have their own separate Web site and that is a good thing," said Paul Taylor, Washington state's deputy director of the Department of Information Services. "However, there is the citizen who wants information and doesn't want to have to guess the agency."
Some IT departments have found a simple solution to the challenge of maintaining identity while providing service in a unified process - an inter-site search engine combined with a standardized use of certain HTML "tags."
How Tags Work
In HTML, a tag is a specific, plain-English command, surrounded by brackets that is not actually seen by users when they view a Web page. Web browsers and other programs use tags to determine how to present a Web page or to provide certain information about the structure, format or content of the page.
There are many types of tags. Web builders use meta tags and title tags to provide information about their Web pages. Information from title tags can be seen by the user, whereas information from meta tags can only be seen by programs such as Web browsers.
A title tag defines the name of a Web page as follows:
The "
A primary use of meta tags is to describe what a user can find on a Web page or Web site. For example, if you were designing a Web site about great American rivers, you might construct a meta tag similar to the following:
Search engines will read these tags to determine whether the Web page is applicable to a particular query. In the above example confusion can arise from the fact that three of the six words used are also the names of states. By defining standard terms to use for tags, agencies can eliminate this type of confusion. Anyone that has ever performed a simple search that yielded 10,000 or more results can appreciate attempts to narrow the field.
Planning A Useful Engine
The question for developers becomes, "How do we ensure that the results are what the user wants?" Washington state has wrestled with this question and come up with a very workable answer: the Ask George feature of the Access Washington Web site
For the first phase, they designed a search feature front end that allowed users to enter plain-English questions. The back end of the service was fed a set of predetermined answers to a thorough list of common questions developed by staff who traditionally responded to constituent calls.
"We were able to get the information about persistently asked questions and their answers from the state's subject matter experts," said Laura Parma, assistant director for the Department of Information Services Interactive Technologies, "and we embedded these things, like where to get birth certificates or building permits, into the first phase of Ask George
With the second phase came the use of standardized tags and "spidering." A spider is an automated program that searches Web sites for Web pages and then indexes their content and location.
Washington's spider runs once every two weeks, searching through more than 300,000 state Web pages and updating the index. The spider looks for information in two places: the title tag and the meta tag.
The title tag is the primary reference point for the spider. To this end, Washington has drawn up strict guidelines for titling a Web page.
Fortunately, they did not have to develop these standards from scratch. The Government Information Locator Service (GILS) initiative of the Washington State Library was the first into the fray for creating standard tagging guidelines.
"The state library pioneered the use of tags," Parma said. This earlier and thorough work not only shortened the runway for getting Ask George off the ground, but also provided the key factors in ensuring that the search engine would provide the best possible results.
"GILS is a strong tool for researchers," Taylor explained, "But [the volume of search results] can be overwhelming. What we also needed was a citizen portal that would make getting information online easy and available for more users."
According to Taylor, they needed friendlier search features that would provide more useful answers for everyday use. Ask George is now used not only by constituents, but has also become a very useful tool to enable those in the government to obtain quick answers.
Coordinating The Sites
Being able to get separate agencies all working on the same page can sometimes be a Herculean task. By keeping things as simple as possible, many of the everyday hurdles can be avoided. The first step was to provide very succinct guidelines for the agencies to follow.
"We worked with the agencies' webmasters to make sure they were familiar with the guidelines, and we make sure the title tags are unique," Parma said, According to Parma, what makes everything work is for title tags to be both unique and have a meaningful reference to what will be found on that Web page, such as the example of "Butte County Vital Records: Birth Certificates" shown earlier.
Washington was able to gather the needed information, handle the implementation process and go live in only a few months.
"It took less time than I thought it would take," Parma said. "Because we'd already had a large Internet presence for so many years, we weren't starting from the beginning."
One major element in making the spidering implementation an easy and effective one was that instead of dictating a long list of tags, they simply used the state library's experience to establish the standard for creating the tags. Operating within those guidelines, agencies could then determine for themselves the best wording for their tags.
Ask George typically handles 5,000 queries in a business day, relieving some of the workload from staff that would normally answer questions over the telephone.
A Good Thing Gets Better
According to Parma, Washington's webmasters rely heavily upon users to improve on the usefulness of the system.
"We get feedback on what kind of things people are asking about, the results they are getting and any gaps in the system," Parma explained. "This allows us to continue to monitor the site and make it as meaningful and effective as possible, and that is important."
Feedback has also allowed them to align term usage. If constituents use a term for something that is different than that used by government agencies, the disparity is noted and taken into account within the meta tag system.
The next step for enhancing the site is to expand its scope. Currently, the Access Washington site is focused on state agencies. Plans are well underway to extend capabilities to include local governments. For example, someone looking for information on parks could obtain results that include state, city and county parks.
"To the citizens, it is one government," Parma said. "They shouldn't have to navigate between multiple jurisdictions."
