Proposal

Introduction

The mission of HURIDOCS is to "strengthen the capacity of human rights organisations to manage and communicate information, enhancing their effectiveness and credibility". One way of doing this is the effective use of metadata. The use of metadata on the web, both bibliographic and thematic, is limited, including among human rights organisations.

There are two reasons for this, one is that these organisations may not know how to use metadata effectively, and the other is they may not have the technical ability to integrate it into their existing or new websites (especially for smaller organisations).

This proposal is intended to help human rights organisations, of all sizes, to use bibliographic standards and other metadata for documents published on the web.

By using bibliographic metadata, organisations will be able to more easily sort and retrieve information. It will enable them to create websites that are more search engine friendly (enabling the search engines to better index the site). It will also make it easier to catalogue and to organise documents, to create "virtual folders" and so on.

Correctly used metadata also enable documents to be organised thematically. For example, if documents are tagged thematically, the use of a simple software programme can display all documents regarding a particular subject, for example violations against women, violations against children or similar. On a similar note, if geographic tags are added, information can easily be sorted by location.

As explained in the introduction, metadata enables both computers and people to more easily find, sort and otherwise manipulate the categorisation of articles and documents. Relevant information, such as the date a publication was first released, the copyright date or contact details, means that other organisations or people can more easily

Aim and Goals

This project has one main aim, with two goals, to address the two problems outlined above.

The aim is to encourage the use of bibliographic standard format and other metadata on the web. Because different organisations have different capabilities, they need different methods for addressing their needs. The two goals then, are to:

• create a manual/guidelines to explain how and why bibliographic metadata should be used on the web;
• use these guidelines to create some 'proof of good practice' tools, that can be used in practice as well as for demonstration purposes. These tools would take the form of plugins or modules for commonly used website management systems.

This document will continue by only looking at the issues around the second goal, as the first goal is covered elsewhere.

There are many state-of-the-art tools available for individuals and organisations for web publishing. Where these are already being used, it makes sense to create a module or plugin that integrates with these systems and allows existing systems to be easily extended.

The tools will serve two purposes, they shall be both an example of what is possible, as a 'proof of good practice', and at the same time they shall be a practical tool for organisations to use.

They will be easy to use, simple, and be compliant with the relevant Internet standards. As well, the plugins/modules will be free/open source, so as to best leverage the power of the community, and enable them to help each other, and contribute changes back to the centre.

As an initial starting point, a plugin for WordPress <http://wordpress.org/> shall be created. This is because WordPress is a solid base, that is already in use by the community (which limits transitional problems). Moreover, for new installations, it is easy and quick to set-up. The plugin system for WordPress is simple, yet robust, it enables the end user to use a plugin simply by placing the files in the plugin directory.

Drupal <http://drupal.org> has also been chosen to develop a module for. Drupal is used quite often by human rights organisations, and has an extensive support for adding additional functionality.

Some guidelines for tools

Both WordPress and Drupal have support for "tags", "categories" (to use the WordPress terminology). Drupal's support is much more extensive, allowing various and multiple "taxonomy". This is very useful for any human rights website. However, when establishing a website with either of these technologies, both only allow one term to be added at a time. Where there exists hundreds of terms (such as in the HURIDOCS index terms, or geographical terms), this can be problematic.

As such, as well as being standards complaint and relatively easy to use, and such tool as to include either the creation of hundreds of entries to the "taxonomy" at a time, or else have these included by default.

As well, the display, by default, of bibliographic metadata on every page/item is required.

Finally, the plugin or module name should be unique. This can be achieved by using the phrase 'huritech' or 'huridocs' in the name.

There are a number of parts for such a tool, including the CSS for theming, function names to print different metadata (including one that will by default print the "basic" list in <ul><li> format, styled using CSS to make it just really really simple), to edit the metadata when adding a post, to change which metadata goes into 'basic', and so on.

Ideally we want to use a class, rather then general functions.

So, each page/item shall have associated with it an object of type "bibmetadata", which shall contain various bits of bibliographic metadata.

While HURIDOCS has bibliographic standards, it is expected that any tool would be flexible to use other standards, such as Dublin Core.

A fictional blog has been established at <http://huritech.org/reporter> to demonstrate how this tool could look. This mock up is a customised WordPress install, which involved more work then can be expected of non-technical persons. Most of the lower level organisations that a plugin or module would be aimed at, would not be able to create this customisation themselves.