CPORTALmeets e-gov target

Linking multiple information sources with a hosted application will help put Medway council on track for e-government compliance

Fretwell-Downing Informatics has launched a hosted application that will enable local government information professionals to link their content and deliver it to searchers without the user needing to know which department holds that information. CPORTAL 2.0, an information integration application, should help local authorities meet this December’s government targets on efficiency and e-government.

The software is designed to help searchers find information without having to know how government bodies are organised or what department is responsible for what. CPORTAL is compatible with the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV) as well as local government category list (LGCL), government category list (GCL) and seamless UK, a single government information search project. Currently, CPORTAL is being used by six local authorities, and public sector organisations.

Users are able to carry out searches on the website of their council and retrieve data from multiple government sources ranging from the NHS to central and local government.

Medway council has been running a community portal (www.aboutmedway.info)since December 2002 that draws information from local and national sources. Helen Leech, Medway’s area librarian, said that the use of CPORTAL had helped the council meet e-government objectives on providing community information and helping local organisations to create websites.

Data can be imported from offline databases, websites and documents from file directories using the application. CPORTAL extracts information from different data silos so that information providers can choose to mine databases that change frequently like NHS sources.

“Data mining is designed to fit around the needs of the people providing information,” said Mark Allcock, e-government business development manager at FDI.

Doncaster Chamber of Commerce has launched a business portal using the application. “CPORTAL was able to draw information from all sources to allow us to have a clever search engine,” said Steve Riley, Doncaster Chamber of Commerce IT applications manager.

Riley said that the system harvests most of the websites daily, but websites with more static content are harvested less frequently.

Meanwhile, the first phase of the Government Secure Intranet (GSI) project has been completed 15 months ahead of schedule. The intranet gives 350,000 employees in 154 central government departments access to a common network.