Not surprisingly to those well-versed in community
information systems, the key Local Government areas
of Planning, Council Tax, Housing, Libraries and
Schools came out at the top of the list, with a wide
range of Council and community service topics
making up the rest.
The two most searched-for subject areas are jobs and
planning applications. No surprise here, as local
authorities are always key employers in their areas and
the current level of interest in planning applications is
high.We were interested though, to see that requests
for school holidays and term dates appeared eighth in
the top ten most requested subjects.
The data was drawn from the most frequently occurring
searches to the databases from a range of the local
authorities whose web site search engines are hosted
by Open Objects Software - making this, we believe,
the largest study of this kind to date.
205,500 requests were submitted to the websites
during the one month period of the study.This volume
of searches is growing steadily as more websites
become fully operational and existing sites grow
better established and attract more searches.
Our study is qualitative in the sense that we are
counting up words and not discrete quantities. For
example,“Schools”,“School” and “SCHOOLS” -
all mean the same for our purposes. We counted
synonyms like Genealogy and Family History together
and we counted searches for “Electoral Roll” and
“Electoral Role” as the same.All the sites in the study
are using Open Objects’ KBroker search solution
which handles this automatically, as it reduces each
word to a phonetic stem and recognises synonyms
before matching to the database.
KBroker Portal provides a full-text natural language
search engine that works with any content management
system or database. It is designed to meet Government
standards, for example results can be influenced using
metatags from the e-Government Metadata Standard
(eGMS). KBroker also includes a categorisation engine
that will automatically recommend which tags from the
Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV) and Local
Government Category List (LGCL) to apply to content.
Open Objects allows its KBroker customers to
customise their search results and it is possible to
use “deep-linking”, where certain searches lead to
particular web pages and for Councils that want to,
it is equally possible to link into external databases,
with a “signpost”.
Over 40 Local Authorities now use the search
service from Open Objects Software servers.