Portal Administración Electrónica (PAE), Spain’s eGovernment portal, now comes with improved search capabilities – including for the reusable IT solutions made available by the country’s technology transfer centre (Centro de Transferencia de Technologica, CTT). The new search engine offers predictions once a user has entered at least three characters.
The predictive search results point to the most prominent PAE content and to CTT’s collection of reusable IT solutions. For the latter, anticipated results will match project names, nicknames or acronyms.
If a search query is entered completely, the search engine will list all the available results. This new feature is part of the default search as well as the advanced search. Showing anticipated results makes the portal easier to use, PAE writes.
CTT also offers an advanced search. Here visitors can limit results by selecting from 11 subcategories. For example, results can be limited to “open source software”, “semantic asset” or “best practice”. Results can also be narrowed down by listing only solutions that can be installed, or that are available as a service.
A third way to access CTT’s repository of reusable IT solutions is through an alphabetical list.
Searching and finding
Searching for software solutions and finding useful results is difficult to automate. It is even harder for a federation of software collections such as on Joinup, which aggregates solutions available in 28 such collections.
In 2012, the European Commission began development of a methodological process to describe IT solutions, aiming to improve automated classification. The outcome, the Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS) project, was launched for Joinup in early 2013 by aggregating solutions from six collections from across the EU. The ADMS is gradually being implemented by others; in 2015, for example, it was added to the collection of software maintained by Adullact, the French service organisation for free software in the public sector.
In 2013, the Commission started working on a second instrument to help describe public sector datasets, entitled Application Profile for Data Portals (DCAT-AP). And in 2016, the EC added a third tool, a specification for describing eGovernment services, entitled Core Public Service Vocabulary Application Profile (CSVAP).