Keeping www.statcan.ca users in the metadata loop

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Keeping www.statcan.ca users in the metadata loop
Louis Boucher Director,Dissemination Division
UNECE Work session on Statistical Dissemination
and Communication 12 to 14 September
2006 Washington DC, USA
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Serving who ?

• Diverse users with diverse needs and skills
• Continuous expansion of content
• Data becoming more complex than ever
• Users need help !
• Data are only useful as long as you can
  understand them !

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Serving what ?

• Users need more than specific data
• Need to know about
• Source and availability
• Applicability and context
• Related documentation
• Alternatives
• Too much ?
• Our task is to present information in an orderly
  manner
• and enable users to make choices.

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Who knows !

• It is all there, just get it !
• Taxonomy ?
• Metadata ?
• Metatags ?
• Need easy and intuitive access
• Users can access complex sets of metadata without
  actively looking for it if

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Experts know it all !

• Taxonomy is to organize
• Subjects and categories
• Metadata is to describe
• Data, products and programs
• Metatags are to find
• Hidden characteristics of web documents
• Used together, these concepts render some
  consistency of data from different sources which
  simplifies its management and retrieval.

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Users need not to know !

• Make these technicalities transparent
• Make their access intuitive
• Proactively present all this contextual
  information
• Simply put, users need to know as little as
  possible about our internal processes in order to
  get all the available information they need

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Caution metadata at work !

• A live demonstration on www.statcan.ca

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• Thank you
• Louis.boucher_at_statcan.ca