Tracking government websites for information integration

Abstract

Nowadays government policies, laws, and other valuable information are published via the web. However, it is very difficult to ensure the comprehensiveness, accuracy and currency of all Webpublications manually, because there are too many Websites that are usually maintained by different departments and agencies. Method. We proposed a Web monitoring system based Web information integration method to resolve this problem. It has been utilized for Australian and Tasmanian government Web information integration for the State Library of Tasmania since July 2005.We have been monitoring 249 federal, state and local government Websites for the Web information integration since July 2005. Monitoring Websites consist of federal government homepages (21 sites, 8%), federal government media release pages (108 sites, 44%), Tasmanian government homepages (73 sites, 30%), Tasmanian government media release pages (16 sites, 6%), and Tasmanian local government homepages (31, 12%) Analysis. We analysed overall, monthly, weekly and daily monitoring trends and usage of the monitoring results. Results. In total, the Web monitoring system collected 30,279 documents during the monitoring period. The most prolific domain is federal media release pages (16,075 documents, 51%). This is followed by Tasmanian government homepages (6,288 documents, 20%), Tasmanian government media release pages (4,673 documents, 15%), federal government homepages (3,243 documents, 10%), and local council homepages (1,493 documents, 5%). These monitoring results are used to modify the current Web information (62%), to add new information(22%), and to delete current Web information (16%)of two Tasmanian government information portal. Conclusions. Our reseach shows that Web monitoring based approach is very useful, because it supports Web information integration without requiring any changes in the current system.