[Commonwealth of Australia]
Functional Requirements for a Whole-of-Australian-Government Search Architecture

A Report by the Search Engine Working Group (SEWG), January 1998


The Search Engine Working Group (SEWG) is a Working Group of the Commonwealth Government Technology and Telecommunications Committee (GTTC), State Navigation Working Party. (The report is also available in MS Word 2.x for downloading)

1. Introduction
1.1 Terms of Reference and Membership
1.2 The Information Management Steering Committee Report
1.3 Working Group on Government Information Navigation
1.4 The Role of the Search Engine Working Group
1.5 Use of Public Search Engines
1.6 Centralised or Distributed Search Architecture

2. Business Issues
2.1 Definition of a ‘Government’ Site
2.2 Variable Search Support Across Government
2.3 Individual Agency Search Engines
2.4 Metadata
2.5 Resource Implications
2.6 Transition Mechanism

3. Functional Requirements
3.0 General Issues
3.1 Scope of Searching
3.2 Data Elements to be Searched
3.3 Improving Search Precision
3.4 Displaying Search Results
3.5 Data Formats to be Searched
3.6 Currency
3.7 Quality of the Data
3.8 Language
3.9 Scalability
3.10 Help Support

4. Search Architecture
4.1 The Model
4.2 Technical Issues
4.2.1 Indexing in Relation to the Three-Tier Model
4.2.2 Responsibility for the Indexing Function
4.2.3 Scalability
4.2.4 Language

5. Recommendations

Appendix 1: SEWG Membership
Appendix 2: SEWG Meeting Dates


Go to the Australian Commonwealth Government Entry Point

Last updated 13 October 1998