Ever the plagiarist I thought I’d ‘borrow’ a metadata profile from a local council site for some other work I’m doing. That should be easy shouldn’t it? Metadata is a standard defined by Dublin Core and eGMS. Standards, by definition, should be applied consistently? Yes? No?

I appear to have fallen into to shark infested waters.

Ok, this was only a random sample of half a dozen councils front pages, done by the simple method of ‘view page source’ on Firefox. There are NOT two samples the same.

Here is an example of one. Please please tell me I’ve missed something because there appears to be no less than three title elements.

<br /> <meta name="Title" content="Welcome to ......."><br /> <meta name="eGMS.Title" lang="en" content="... - Home page"><br /> <meta name="DC.title" lang="en" content="Welcome to the website of ... Council"><br />

Down with duplication! Long live triplication!

It may be me that’s wrong or misunderstanding something so I’ve anonymised the council - but this is the full set of metadata.

Some of the other bits look a bit dodgy as well. Subject category is repeated, but in one instance looks to me like a description (which is more useful when results are displayed than the category anyway)

<br /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"></p> <link rel="schema.DC" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"> <link rel="schema.DCTERMS" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"> <link rel="schema.eGMS" href="http://www.esd.org.uk/standards/egms/egms.rdfs"> <meta name="Title" content="Welcome to ......."><br /> <meta name="Description" content=".... Council Homepage"><br /> <meta name="Keywords" content="......"><br /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"><br /> <meta name="eGMS.Title" lang="en" content="... - Home page"><br /> <meta name="eGMS.Description" lang="en" content=" (is the same as the title)"><br /> <meta name="eGMS.Subject.Category" lang="en" content="Information about Council services and local organisations provided by ...."><br /> <meta name="eGMS.subject.category" lang="en" scheme="GCL" content="Government, politics and public administration"><br /> <meta name="eGMS.subject.category" lang="en" scheme="LGCL" content="Council, government and democracy, Local government"><br /> <meta name="eGMS.Subject.Keyword" lang="en" content=" (lots of areas council covers) "><br /> <meta name="DC.creator" lang="en" content=" Webteam in E-Services, webmanager@council.gov.uk"><br /> <meta name="DC.date" scheme="ISO8601" content="2004-09-30"><br /> <meta name="DC.coverage" lang="en" content="... UK"><br /> <meta name="DC.description" lang="en" content=".... Council - Welcome"><br /> <meta name="DC.title" lang="en" content="Welcome to the website of ... Council"><br /> <meta name="DC.language" scheme="ISO 639-2/T" content="eng"><br /> <meta name="DC.publisher" lang="en" content="..."><br /> <meta name="DC.type" lang="en" scheme="e-GMSTES" content="Home page of .... Council"><br /> <meta name="DC.identifier" lang="en" "><br /> <meta name="DC.rights" lang="en" content="Copyright .... Council 2004"><br /> <meta name="eGMS.accessibility" lang="en" scheme="WCAG" content="Double-A"><br /> <meta name="DCTERMS.audience" content="" scheme="LGAL"><br /> <meta name="eGMS.Date.Created" lang="en" content="2004-04-30"><br /> <meta name="eGMS.Date.Modified" lang="en" content="2004-09-30"></p> <p>