David Bath

In answer to :"What are the digital and media literacy skills that Australian households and businesses need to engage effectively online?" One of the key enablers for businesses, households, and agencies of government, is the ability to find relevant and only relevant information. This involves metadata management, which is universally woeful. Idiot Guides about metadata, particularly for production of content (including Hansard!), and enforcement within agencies, would be very helpful. (The Idiot Guides to the Spam Act are an example of a useful rendering of a complex set of regulations). Non-government organizations (including companies) can be encouraged to use a thesaurus of terms that is consolidated across governments, rather than the current practice of each jurisdiction creating it's own thesaurus. This consolidation might be provided in the first instance using RDF and associated products, prepared by agencies such as AGIMO and NAA. Of course, the big problem is with email - even though IETF RFC822 X-Headers can hold metadata (e.g. in AGLS/DublinCore schemata) with use of a significant prefix after the "X-", most email clients neither display nor allow entry of these X-Headers. Encouraging commercial and non-commercial providers of email clients to include such simple capabilities, then mandating use of X-Header capable clients (first within agencies, and later within large businesses) would go a long way to improving the integration (and therefore the utility) of all the disparate information created within Australia. I see poor metadata creation and use as the key disabler of the digital economy. My experience as an enterprise architect (including work in an agency of government) proves to me at least that our skills in this area are very suboptimal, and are often contrary to existing regulations.