PSI transparency in a multi-lingual environment

Google responds to US President call for ideas on how to open up PSI for society

Mount View: 22 June 2009

Google in response to the President of the USA’s call for ideas on how to open up the government to its Citizens submitted a series of recommendations on 19 June 2009. The Google Public Policy Blog topic titled: Our recommendations for increasing citizens’ access to government information highlights a number of the recommendations put forward and states:

“First, agencies can adopt the Sitemaps protocol, which allow search engines to crawl websites more intelligently. Most search engines offer free Sitemap generator tools -- check out Google Sitemap Generator.

Second, agencies can review their robots.txt files. Many agencies currently block large portions of their websites from search engines with robots.txt files, sometimes unknowingly. By reviewing and selectively using these files, webmasters can easily open up large amounts of content to citizens. Free analysis tools like Google's robots.txt test can help webmasters identify which pages are accidentally being blocked.”

These Google suggestions are not new and the ePSIplus Thematic Network reported on these methods back in 2007.

One of the interesting aspects of opening up public sector information within Europe is how to overcome exclusion due to language barriers. The European Union has 23 official languages and dynamic translation of online data and information assists reduce linguistic barriers. Many public sector bodies web sites within Europe have dynamic translators embedded using the tools provided by private sector entities such as Google. However there is a catch. Public Sector bodies have a concern about maintaining authenticity and as such often publish information in documents in secure formats, which stops dynamic translators reading the document. (Also stops copy and paste into translators)

An example

In France l’Agence du patrimoine immatériel de l’État (APIE) is involved with respect to supporting the implementation of the European Union Directive 2003/98/EC within France and the information published is of direct relevance to others across the European Union that may wish to re-use public sector information held by French public sector bodies. APIE have published the Rapport d’activité 2007-2008 during April 2009, however it has been published in a secure PDF format. This is but one of many examples that exist across Europe.