AGLS for the rest of the web?
Categorised under: Information architecture
The National Archives of Australia has just released a new standard that it promised will revolutionise the way information is sorted on the Internet. Basically, this a reworking of the AGLS (Australian Government Locator Service) metadata standard to meet the needs of a broader web community. They make some pretty grand claims:
Lists of irrelevant websites generated by web searches will be a thing of the past thanks to the Australian Standard developed by the National Archives, Standards Australia, industry, and state governments. The Standard promises to eliminate the hundreds of irrelevant ‘hits’ usually generated by search engines.
The Chief Executive of Standards Australia, Ross Wraight, says, ‘It will make web searches far more efficient and accurate and I encourage anyone working with the web to adopt the Standard’.
I can only wonder, however, how this meshes with the earlier reported news that all but one major search engine now ignores keywords, as they reduce the quality of search results, not improve it…
[Thanks to Eric Scheid of IAwiki.]
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 