Pam Spurr, Department of Finance and Admin
FED.GOV.AU is the Commonwealth Government Entry Point providing easy access to Commonwealth authorised information and services.
With a simple click of your mouse button, you can have immediate access to more than 300 web sites and 350 000 documents across Australia providing a wealth of authorised Commonwealth Government information and services.
This innovative Australian Commonwealth Government Entry point is maintained by AUSINFO, a unit of the Department of Finance and Administration.
The Entry Point has been designed as a one-stop shop. It tracks web sites at the federal level, maintains an extensive search engine, subject index and metadata repository so everything you need is at your fingertips.
You can tap into a government-wide contact directory, a growing list of ‘What’s New’ pages from individual government departments, a Government media release email service and even weather reports. No matter what you are looking for, FED.GOV.AU is the best place to start – and all of the information available through it is authorised.
There is an enormous variety of information through FED.GOV.AU. You can for example, access:
FED.GOV.AU is the main portal to the Commonwealth Government’s Internet Sites –
The Site Search combines much of the information held in FED.GOV.AU and makes it accessible from the front page of the site.
One of the main reasons people would come to FED.GOV.AU is because they are after information but do not know where to start looking.
The Subject Index was designed to be non-portfolio based making Government Services and Information available without having to search through web sites that may or may not contain the information sought.
The information is stored as a hierarchical tree so that people can browse down through the tree to the area of interest.
Some things to bear in mind about the Index are –
FED.GOV.AU maintains a list of over 370 sites that the Commonwealth currently funds.
Sites can be found in these ways –
For each site clicking on Browse takes you to the site, clicking on Search will take you to the FED.GOV.AU search engine where the search will be restricted to just the site selected.
FED.GOV.AU offers a unique service with our free Media Release subscription service.
The service is extremely successful, having over 2,800 subscribers.
Details of our subscriber base –
The Search engine is specifically targeted for Researchers.
This is because a search engine can be hard to use, especially when a term list GST will return more than 4000 hits.
This makes finding specific information quite difficult and often beyond the capabilities of the casual user.
However, ‘searching’ is an invaluable tool for people familiar with search engine technology.
Here are some main points about the Search Engine on FED.GOV.AU –
The information on Government web sites is constantly changing.
Also, topics that are of public interest change depending on what the Government is currently doing. For example, the Budget, East Timor Crisis and the GST.
For FED.GOV.AU to operate as well as it can, the ideal would be to have the user enter what they are interested in on the front page of FED.GOV.AU and then the search results returned would enable the user to go straight to the information they are after.
Because of this, it is necessary to have a finger on the pulse of what subjects are of interest on a day to day basis.
FED.GOV.AU does this by monitoring what subjects are being searched for in the Site Search facility.
At AUSINFO we call this ‘Failed Searches’ monitoring.
By monitoring what subject we do not have information on, we ensure that the majority of users (the figure of successful searches is currently 85%) will receive back useful links.
As a result of a ‘failed search’ we may include the information in –
This is one way to ensure that we are on the right track.
In all cases our efforts are directed to providing a concentrated body of relevant information which changes as time and requirements change.
Looking to the future, AusInfo is working with the Office for Government Online and each of the States and Territories in an initiative called GOVERNET. This collaborative project will lead to users being able to access information from across all the tiers of government – Commonwealth, state and local – through a single seamless interface.
A related improvement will be the way the Entry Point is enhanced to make full use of the metadata which all Commonwealth agencies lodge on their sites under the Online Information Service Obligations. By working with this metadata, the Entry Point will provide a more tightly focused, targeted access to Commonwealth information, with more powerful search tools than were previously possible.
Jointly, these initiatives will see the Entry Point continuing to be one of the most sophisticated and powerful portals of its kind in the world today. The collaborative approach taken in developing them, working with other agencies and governments, will be the pattern for all our future work.
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