David Perera discusses a new metadata initiative at the White House in his article, “White House Data Strategy Calls for Standardized Metadata and Identity Authentication.” The newly released strategy calls for metadata standards as a top priority when it comes to federal information sharing. The strategy also calls for a further extension of the Federal Credential and Access Management framework. Perera explains the objective,

The new document does define policy objectives, however, including the promotion of finer-grained access controls through promotion of data-level tagging, also known as metadata. Today, most information authorization models are defined at the network or application level, but network consolidation and shared service adoption means that access controls should be applied to the data itself, the strategy says.

Perera adds that tagging benefits data discovery and access, but also enables the enforcement of access decisions based on the data relevancy to the mission of the person searching the data given certain attributes, such as workplace or security clearance.

The article is another highlight of the power of tagging data. Governments are employing the Smartlogic solution to increase efficiency across departments. Smartlogic classifies content for organizations using the process of analyzing a document and adding metadata “tags” that describe the document which is sourced from taxonomy or other form of controlled vocabulary. This means that business processes are streamlined and redundancy is eliminated. With the Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform, advanced content classification, metadata enrichment, and navigation capabilities are added to deliver enterprises a complete information management experience.

Alice Wilson, December 31, 2012

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