Records Management Support in the Interoperability Framework for the Portuguese Public Administration

Abstract

The Portuguese public administration has a core technological infrastructure for interoperability, which assures reliable core transactions, but takes all information objects as equals, leaving any necessary specialization to the applications. However, public administrations are highly regulated environments, which implies business processes involving entities of that domain are subject to strong requirements for information management. Records management in special is a specific concern, meaning metadata for that purpose must be produced along the production of the regular business information objects. In that sense, when two or more entities of a domain of this kind engage in transactions, it is helpful for all those involved if also metadata created for that purpose can be shared, which requires it to be commonly understood. In Portugal, national guidelines have been developed to support that goal, remaining now the challenge of their implementation. This is a classic problem of interoperability in distributed information systems, which has particular challenges when scoped in the domain of a large public administration, involving thousands of local systems. This paper describes the results of a research project intended to provide a proof of concept for that for the case of the Portuguese public administration, which resulted in a case of application of the Canonical Data Model method. The metadata schema produced is assessed using the Bruce-Hillman metadata quality framework, which made possible to conclude by its effectiveness, along with suggestions for future improvements.