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Globe Information Locator Service
Globe Information
Locator Service (GILS), is designed as a profile that
combines policy, standard, information technology and
products to enable people to locate and retrieval information
from diverse sources. It involves governments, companies,
information providers and different initiatives around
the world, led by the Global Information Society initiative,
which was organized by G7 countries. Sometimes GILS is
called as Government Information Service since it based
on the United States Federal
Government Information Locator Service initiative project.
The U.S. Government Information Locator
Service is an approach to identify, locate, and describe
Federal information resources including electronic information
resources, and make them available to public. GILS is
a decentralized collection of agency-based information
locators using information technologies, metadata and
standards to let user retrieval Federal Government information
resources located in different servers. The U.S. Federal
GILS was mandated by the Paperwork
Reduction Act in 1995 (U.S. Public Law 44 USC 3511),
which requires each Federal agency to establish and maintain
an information locator service as a component of the Service.
Besides the United States Federal Government,
some U.S. states governments and other countries and provinces'
governments including Australian, Canadian
Federal Government, Ontario
also have set up their GILS standards, or policies. The
ISO 23950 / ANSI Z39.50 standard, which was developed
for structured search across databases such as bibliographic
catalogs in library, is one of the standards within GILS
for exchanging electronic information.
Metadata is
a key component in GLIS. This is because within GILS there
are various agencies and locator services. Each of them
may use different data structure for their information,
and use different types of Metadata schema to describe
those resources. For example, the geospatial data in the
U.S. Federal Government agency can use Dublin Core
Metadata Element Set, or FGDC Metadata;
a library catalog which is also a locator service, uses
MARC for bibliographic description. So
a Metadata schema (the GILS Core Elements) with approximately
70 elements is used to map different metadata sets, and
describe other electronic resources in a uniform manner
for searching and retrieving. In certain way it can be
seen as a fairly complex metadata format. This result
could be contributed to the heavy influence from the MARC
and Z39.50 standard. The Annex B of GILS
Profile provides the mapping from GILS to USMARC.
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