Dubai e-Government completes first phase of training for content staff

There is nothing more irritating than accessing a portal or site on the web only to find that you are unable to get the information that you need so desperately. You are aware that the information is available on the Internet but the longer you search, the more you end up lost and in the wrong place. It is to avoid such mishaps and irritations for users of the integrated government portal, that Dubai e-Government conducted a four-day training workshop from March10-13, 2002 for representatives from all the government departments. This is an important step towards empowering each department to managing their own sections of the portal independently, while at the same time conforming to stringent centralized standards. All trainees were awarded certificates of participation in this first phase of training.

As Dubai e-Government takes significant steps towards the integration of government departments through the single portal www.dubai.ae, the focus naturally is on the efficacy of the content management systems currently employed by the various departments. In order to offer the best available services via the net to the citizens of Dubai and to enable users to access the information easily, it becomes imperative to unify and integrate the content management systems of the various department websites.

"A well-designed content management system is essential to fulfill our goal of providing an entire range of online services to citizens, because it provides the framework for organizing the content so that it can be delivered and reused in a variety of innovative ways," said Salem Al Shair, Director e-Services, Dubai e-Government. "Once the Dubai e-Government information model has been incorporated into all the government websites each department will offer the same enhanced means of search and retrieval making it easy for authors and users to find and access information resources they need quickly and easily."

The four-day workshop, which concluded on Wednesday, was the first phase of the training program and included a detailed overview of the organizational framework for the representatives of various government departments. It focused mainly on the various aspects of the content management system on the e-Government portal, with particular emphasis on the technical aspects of uploading and publishing content, in addition to creating easy navigation channels through the websites. The training sessions were conducted by Anas Haddad, Content Manager; Hesham Amiri, Assistant Content Manager and Ghazi Saad Content Editor Arabic Dubai e-Government.

Some of the most interesting aspects of the training sessions concentrated on metadata and its significance to the speedy and accurate retrieval of content. Metadata is the higher-level data that describes lower-level data and comprises seemingly unimportant details like the headline, description or keywords that identify a file or document. Most authors of content are often careless about the specificity of the metadata and this creates innumerable problems for the user. Haddad explained the details of the metadata policy in use on the Dubai e-Government portal so that all government departments would incorporate and commit to the same policy on their individual websites. He also emphasized the significance of tagging all published documents and not just creating a single metadata for the entire website.

"The efficacy with which a search engine retrieves data depends on the effectiveness of the content management system in use. A highly effective system will ensure accurate retrieval and listing of content on the website in the first five results of the search," said Anas Haddad. "Dubai e-Government's system is highly specialized and is almost ten times faster than standard HTML publishing."

It is very easy to recognize a website where there is no underlying information model because you find it extremely difficult to navigate through the site. Links do not lead you according to the promise, you start at the home page and end up in the same wrong place and you drill through endless information only to get further away from your goal, rather than closer to it.

Interestingly, a well-designed content management system hardly gets any notice at all because it simply doesn't interfere with the user's search. Much of this efficiency depends on the channel navigation management that has been incorporated into the system. Ghazi Saad stressed the necessity to provide links at each level for proper navigation through the portal. In addition, the workshop included detailed explanations about the methods employed to upload and publish content on the Dubai e-Government portal. The trainers took the trainees through the various steps of uploading files on to the server, in addition to regular texts and ensuring that these are published at the correct location.

"The representatives of the government departments also received a set of standards and documents created by the e-Government team to unify and streamline the style guidelines of all the e-publishing processes in Dubai e-Government. These documents have been created in accordance with the international standards based on ISO 13407, ISO 10075, ISO 9126, ISO 9241 and W3C Accessibility guidelines," said Haddad.

"This is the first phase of the training while the second phase will include more intensive training for each separate department. The trainees also included young interns from Zayed university and Sharjah Women's College who will later be incorporated into e-Government team to design and produce catalogues and leaflets for further training sessions," he added.

Abdul Aziz Al Ali from the Civil Defence IT Department and one of the trainees at the event said, "This content management system has much more advanced features than the one currently in use on our website. There are greater levels of security and it is much easier to upload content by using this system."

The content management system currently in use on the Dubai e-Government portal is based on the latest version of best of breed technologies and has been specifically customized to the needs and requirements at Dubai e-Government after intensive research and analysis.

Balquis Al Mulla from Dubai Courts and Shaima Ahmed Abdul Rahman from Dubai Economic Department pointed out this training would help them tremendously in their work because they would be following an organized system for publishing content. Oday K Al Rubaee and Yousuf Hassan from the Awqaf Department said that incorporating this system into their website would help to standardize the quality of content and would ensure ease of navigation through the portal.