(Revised) PSI Directive Theme: Discoverability
It is self evident that for information to be reused, it must be discovered. However, the scale of the Web - the sheer volume of information published online every minute - means that publishers need to make an effort to help that discovery. Publishers of all kinds depend on search engines to catalogue and classify information, a task that can only be achieved by using extremely sophisticated computing, but search engines do not work by magic. It's important to help this process of automated classification if your information is to be discovered. Two key factors aid discovery:
- the information is well organised, self-contained and can be understood in isolation;
- the information is described using appropriate metadata.
The following Best Practices give guidance on what needs to be done to make public sector information readily discoverable.