Local Government Category List

Last updated

The Local Government Category List (LGCL), is a metadata standard controlled vocabulary of subject metadata terms related to local government, published in the UK. It has been superseded by the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV) but remains available for reference.

Contents

Development

The LGCL was developed by the Local Authority Websites National Project (LAWs), an initiative that aimed to meet the "requirement for a structured approach to information handling, publication and navigation". [1] The LGCL was created as part of the Information Architecture & Standards project strand, the responsibility for which was delegated to the London Borough of Camden. [2] Version 1.0 was released in October 2003 and version 1.01 in the following month. [3] [4] Version 1.02 was released in January 2004 and officially remains the current full version. [5] Version 1.03 was published in March 2004 but is still considered to be a draft. [6] The LGCL was merged with the Government Category List, and the seamlessUK taxonomy to form the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV) as part of the UK Government e-GMS initiative. [7] [8] The LGCL has since been mapped back to the IPSV as well as having been mapped to the Government Category List and the Local Government Services List (the 'PID List') and the previous APLAWS Category List. [9] The LGCL and mappings are published in XML, PDF and Word formats. [10] LGCL is formally deprecated in favour of the IPSV. [11]

Description

The LGCL comprises a poly-hierarchy of terms, comprising thirteen broad high-level terms divided into increasingly detailed sub-levels. The top-level terms are:

These top-level terms are each divided into two-level terms, some of which may be further subdivided into as many as four further sublevels of detail. Thus, for example, "Wheelchairs" appears as a sixth-level subdivision of Health and social care:

Terms may be repeated at different levels but have consistent meanings, so, for example, "Cycling" appears as a type of transport route under "Transport and streets","Cycling, pedestrian and other pathways","Cycling" as well as an outdoor pursuit under "Leisure and culture","Sports","Types of sports", "Outdoor pursuits", "Cycling". Synonyms are provided for many of the preferred terms. The standard also includes a commitment that terms will never be removed from the list, but may change status or move position in the hierarchy between versions. [12]

Use

One of the intended uses of the standard was to provide a default local authority Web site navigation hierarchy that could be used flexibly with an appropriate level of detail to meet local requirements. [12] The standard was also recommended for use as the basis of records management system file plans. [13]

Availability

The LGCL remains freely available "without guarantees and without licensing costs" and may be used and reproduced free of charge provided specific restrictions and appropriate attribution are respected. [10]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dublin Core</span> Standardized set of metadata elements

The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen main metadata items for describing digital or physical resources. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is responsible for formulating the Dublin Core; DCMI is a project of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), a non-profit organization.

An e-GIF, or eGovernment Interoperability Framework, is a scheme for ensuring the inter-operation of computer-based systems. It is intended to resolve and prevent problems arising from incompatible content of different computer systems. An e-GIF may aim to facilitate government processes at local, national or international levels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Medical Subject Headings</span> Controlled vocabulary

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a comprehensive controlled vocabulary for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences. It serves as a thesaurus that facilitates searching. Created and updated by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), it is used by the MEDLINE/PubMed article database and by NLM's catalog of book holdings. MeSH is also used by ClinicalTrials.gov registry to classify which diseases are studied by trials registered in ClinicalTrials.

A medical classification is used to transform descriptions of medical diagnoses or procedures into standardized statistical code in a process known as clinical coding. Diagnosis classifications list diagnosis codes, which are used to track diseases and other health conditions, inclusive of chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus and heart disease, and infectious diseases such as norovirus, the flu, and athlete's foot. Procedure classifications list procedure code, which are used to capture interventional data. These diagnosis and procedure codes are used by health care providers, government health programs, private health insurance companies, workers' compensation carriers, software developers, and others for a variety of applications in medicine, public health and medical informatics, including:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tag (metadata)</span> Keyword assigned to information

In information systems, a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information. This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system, although they may also be chosen from a controlled vocabulary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Learning object metadata</span> Data model

Learning Object Metadata is a data model, usually encoded in XML, used to describe a learning object and similar digital resources used to support learning. The purpose of learning object metadata is to support the reusability of learning objects, to aid discoverability, and to facilitate their interoperability, usually in the context of online learning management systems (LMS).

The ISO/IEC 11179 Metadata Registry (MDR) standard is an international ISO/IEC standard for representing metadata for an organization in a metadata registry. It documents the standardization and registration of metadata to make data understandable and shareable.

The e-Government Metadata Standard, e-GMS, is the UK e-Government Metadata Standard. It defines how UK public sector bodies should label content such as web pages and documents to make such information more easily managed, found and shared.

Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3C recommendation designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary. SKOS is part of the Semantic Web family of standards built upon RDF and RDFS, and its main objective is to enable easy publication and use of such vocabularies as linked data.

IMS VDEX, which stands for IMS Vocabulary Definition Exchange, in data management, is a mark-up language – or grammar – for controlled vocabularies developed by IMS Global as an open specification, with the Final Specification being approved in February 2004.

The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) is a metadata standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The standard is maintained as part of the MARC standards of the Library of Congress, and is being developed as an initiative of the Digital Library Federation (DLF).

indecs was a project partly funded by the European Community Info 2000 initiative and by several organisations representing the music, rights, text publishing, authors, library and other sectors in 1998-2000, which has since been used in a number of metadata activities. A final report and related documents were published; the indecs Metadata Framework document is a concise summary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metadata</span> Data about data

Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DMOZ</span> Open content directory of Web links established in 1998

DMOZ was a multilingual open-content directory of World Wide Web links. The site and community who maintained it were also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP). It was owned by AOL but constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.

A metadata standard is a requirement which is intended to establish a common understanding of the meaning or semantics of the data, to ensure correct and proper use and interpretation of the data by its owners and users. To achieve this common understanding, a number of characteristics, or attributes of the data have to be defined, also known as metadata.

Read codes are a clinical terminology system that was in widespread use in General Practice in the United Kingdom until around 2018, when NHS England switched to using SNOMED CT. Read codes are still in use in Scotland and in England were permitted for use in NHS secondary care settings, such as dentistry and mental health care until 31 March 2020. Read codes support detailed clinical encoding of multiple patient phenomena including: occupation; social circumstances; ethnicity and religion; clinical signs, symptoms and observations; laboratory tests and results; diagnoses; diagnostic, therapeutic or surgical procedures performed; and a variety of administrative items. It therefore includes but goes significantly beyond the expressivity of a diagnosis coding system.

Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification.

In the context of information retrieval, a thesaurus is a form of controlled vocabulary that seeks to dictate semantic manifestations of metadata in the indexing of content objects. A thesaurus serves to minimise semantic ambiguity by ensuring uniformity and consistency in the storage and retrieval of the manifestations of content objects. ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 defines a content object as "any item that is to be described for inclusion in an information retrieval system, website, or other source of information". The thesaurus aids the assignment of preferred terms to convey semantic metadata associated with the content object.

BIBFRAME is a data model for bibliographic description. BIBFRAME was designed to replace the MARC standards, and to use linked data principles to make bibliographic data more useful both within and outside the library community.

Data collection system (DCS) is a computer application that facilitates the process of data collection, allowing specific, structured information to be gathered in a systematic fashion, subsequently enabling data analysis to be performed on the information. Typically a DCS displays a form that accepts data input from a user and then validates that input prior to committing the data to persistent storage such as a database.

References

  1. ↑ "What is LAWs?". Local Authority Websites National Project. Retrieved 25 January 2016.
  2. ↑ "LAWs Project Website: Information Architecture & Standards". Local Authority Websites National Project. Retrieved 25 January 2016.
  3. ↑ "Local Government Category List v1.0 released". Local Authority Websites National Project. 14 October 2003. Retrieved 25 January 2016.
  4. ↑ "LGCL v1.01". Local Authority Websites National Project. 13 November 2003. Retrieved 25 January 2016.
  5. ↑ "LGCL v1.02 released". Local Authority Websites National Project. 20 January 2004. Retrieved 25 January 2016.
  6. ↑ "LGCL 1.03 released". Local Authority Websites National Project. 19 March 2004. Retrieved 25 January 2016.
  7. ↑ "IPSV/GCL". Cabinet Office. Archived from the original on 25 November 2010.
  8. ↑ Atherton, Lucy (2002). "seamlessUK – building bridges between information islands". New Library World. 103 (11/12): 467–473. doi:10.1108/03074800210452996.
  9. ↑ Dodgson, Paul; Jeffrey-Cook, Richard (August 2007). "Developing the local government classification scheme". BCS . Retrieved 18 January 2016.
  10. 1 2 "LGCL-Local Government Category List". Local Authority Websites National Project. 12 January 2004. Archived from the original on 23 November 2008. Retrieved 25 January 2016.
  11. ↑ "LGCL (Local Government Category List) Resources". Local Authority Websites National Project. 12 January 2004. Archived from the original on 9 September 2015. Retrieved 25 January 2016.
  12. 1 2 "Local Government Category List Version 1.02" (PDF). Local Authority Websites National Project. 12 January 2004. Archived from the original (PDF) on 28 January 2007. Retrieved 25 January 2016.
  13. ↑ "Developing a Fileplan for Local Government" (PDF). In-Form Consult. 2004. Retrieved 25 January 2016.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.