- Community & e-government information integration
LOCAL COUNCILS, CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE AND REGIONAL CONSORTIA GET NEW OCLC PICA CPORTAL RELEASE BENEFITTING OVER 7 MILLION CITIZENS
New e-government citizen’s information software, CPORTAL 2.0 from OCLC PICA, has been released and rolled out to consortia, councils and chambers of commerce across England. Citizens using websites from Essex County Council, Medway Council, Royal London Borough of Kingston, Doncaster Chamber of Commerce and The West Midlands Local Government Association will benefit from faster thesaurus and Geospatial Information-enabled searches and locally-tuned relevance ranking.
CPORTAL is OCLC PICA's e-Government information integration software for local government and the community.
CPORTAL is designed to enable the public to interact with local authorities more easily and without needing to know how information is organised, and which tier of local government, or local group, provides which service.
Helen Leech, Public and Community Information Manager at AboutMedway (www.aboutmedway.info), says, “OCLC PICA’s CPORTAL enables Medway Council to meet its e-government objective of delivering integrated information about services for the community.”
The public can interact with different local governments during the course of a single day. By joining up these services through CPORTAL , citizens have a seamless experience of dealing with local government, whilst CPORTAL delivers increased efficiencies for local authorities. The ongoing drive for councils to achieve better services with less funds, from IEG, CPA and the Gershon efficiency review, means that the need for genuinely integrated services is increasingly business-critical.
Mark Allcock, OCLC PICA's e-Government Business Development Manager, says, “CPORTAL 2.0 provides a unique offering for multi-agency searching that presents local information that is both relevance ranked and geo-enabled, alongside information from national providers such as the NHS and LearnDirect. Only CPORTAL offers this in the e-Government marketplace. It is important to our customers that their local information is not lost to the public, as tends to be the case with other search engines.”
Helen Leech agrees, “CPORTAL 2.0 brings together local and national information by, for and about Medway and increasingly is allowing us to support local initiatives and meet the information needs of particular groups of people.”
CPORTAL is compatible with a range of taxonomies and thesauri including LGCL, GCL, seamlessUK and the new Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary.
OCLC PICA’s suite of e-Government applications is constantly being updated to meet new demands. A key benefit for OCLC PICA’s users is the data-mining technology which allows them to import data from off-line databases and documents from file directories as well as to harvest information from websites. OCLC PICA is planning releases of new harvesting and data-mining technologies later in 2005.
