| NEWSTRACK | September 2006 |
Sending a signal: South Holland adopts Semaphore for web content management
APR Smartlogik, a leader in automatic content categorisation and taxonomy-based search solutions, has announced that South Holland District Council in Lincolnshire has invested in Semaphore, bringing the company’s local government client base to just under a third of all English local authorities. The Council will implement Semaphore to structure its spiralling volumes of internal content, including records held in Microsoft Sharepoint, in preparation for the roll-out of its intranet – the real backbone of knowledge sharing and internal efficiency savings. In the quest for consistency and maximum return-on-investment, Semaphore will also be applied to South Holland’s external website content, boosting the accuracy and richness of online information services for citizens.
South Holland will implement Semaphore, the UK’s most widely used, e-GIF (e-Government Interoperability Framework) compliant tagging software to automatically categorise the Council’s electronic content using standard terms from the IPSV (Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary. Steve Larner, Head of Customer and Information Services at South Holland District Council, explains, “We conducted a stringent review of the suitable software providers, assessing their technical capabilities, software user-friendliness, information management expertise and customer service approach. We chose APR Smartlogik over the newer market entrants because of the maturity of Semaphore, the company’s strong customer references, including those who are integrating with Microsoft Sharepoint, and their impressive client management team.”
Quality metadata and a rich thesaurus (or taxonomy) are essential components to join-up electronic content, whether delivered internally or via websites. Steve Larner continues, “Many councils’ web editors are still burdened with the time-consuming and error-prone task of categorising content manually. We are investing valuable time and resources into our intranet project and we simply cannot afford for information to be ‘lost’ in unstructured, wrongly tagged documents. We are confident that Semaphore will help us derive full value from our information assets, dramatically improving citizen service and efficiency across the Council”.
APR Smartlogik will help South Holland go live with Semaphore over the next few weeks. They will also support the Council as the intranet is rolled out, holding an open day and training sessions to make sure nearly 300 staff will get the most out of their new service.
Jeremy Bentley, CEO, APR Smartlogik, adds, “Internal information management is a key challenge this year for local councils. But as authorities turn to internal content, we must not forget that more and more UK citizens are becoming ‘self-serving’ users of Council websites and there is still much work to be done in improving external information delivery. The deadline for meta-tagging using the official IPSV category list is this December, but non-compliant councils need to act now. Information management is the foundation for delivering more sophisticated, interactive services - and many councils risk running before they can walk.”
APR Smartlogik. www.aprsmartlogik.com
South Holland District Council. www.sholland.gov.uk/
