Commonality

The scheme also aimed to provide a degree of commonality between the different websites in the sector. If the different providers of law-related websites were to use a common classification scheme to structure their information it would provide consistency across the range of different sites. This would improve usability for people looking for this type of information. It would also mean that the various sites would be more likely to use the same words for the same materials: again increasing consistency and usability.

A further aim was to provide an off-the-shelf scheme which could be picked up and used by advice organisations which were in the process of setting up a website. Anyone doing this would be faced with the need to devise some way of structuring their information and an off-the-shelf scheme would prevent re-inventing the wheel.

The Lord Chancellor's Department had a further ambition to increase the use of metadata on advice and legal websites. At that point they were using a search engine - Infoseek to provide a search on Just Ask! and saw the need for standardised metadata in order to improve the quality of that search.

The new scheme was developed by Stella Dextre Clarke and Christine Miskin. They started by looking at the classification schemes in use in the advice sector including those used by Just Ask, Citizens Advice, Shelter, and DIAL UK (which had commissioned a specialist faceted scheme from Elizabeth Orna). Using the common threads of those schemes they developed a new scheme which would make sense to the general public.

The Legal and Advice Metadata Scheme Content Classification Scheme (LAMS CCS) that emerged was a three tier poly-hierarchical scheme consisting of 14 headings and thesaurus.

LASA (London Advice Services Alliance) was commissioned to promote the scheme and provide training in its use - including the use of metadata. As part of this project they also provided training and guidance on accessible web design.

The scheme was an immediate success and a number of organisations adopted it for their websites. It was implemented in its entirety by Just Ask! and by Advicenow. Shelter used the scheme's housing section as the basis of its own scheme for the Shelter website, developing further levels of detail to meet the requirements of a specialist site. Liberty used it in the same way within their own specialism. Other smaller agencies, like Coventry Law Centre, used it as the basis for their own website.

This inevitably led to divergence from the initial scheme with different dialects developing. We had no resources to control this use of the scheme or to incorporate additional levels created by specialists.

How the scheme works

The LAMS CCS divides rights and legal information into 14 broad subject areas (called ‘headings’). Information within each category is then subdivided into more focused subject areas (called ‘mid-terms’), which are, in turn, sub-divided into even more focused subject areas (called ‘leaf-terms’).

Example:

• 1…….Benefits

• 1.1……..Benefit administration

• 1.1.1……..Benefit claims and payments

• 1.1.2… ….Benefit fraud

• 1.1.3……..Benefit revision and appeal

• 1.2……..Carers benefits

• 1.3……..Disability benefits

• 1.4……..Families and children's benefits

• 1.4.1………Bereavement benefits

• 1.4.2……….Childrens benefits

• 1.4.3……….Maternity benefits

The LAMS CCS is ‘poly-hierarchical’ so terms can appear in more than one category in the scheme. For example, the term “Job seeking benefits” appears both under “Benefits” and “Employment”.

The CCS also includes a thesaurus. This includes all the synonyms, the non-preferred terms that people might use in a search, linked to the appropriate preferred terms. For example, “Sacking” is a non-preferred term for “Dismissal and redundancy” and “DLA” is a non-preferred term for “Disability Living Allowance”.

The thesaurus takes the form of an alphabetical list of preferred terms (that is, headings, mid-terms and leaf-terms) in the CCS together with synonyms for each preferred term. Example:

Thesaurus jargon

Metadata

The CCS uses three elements from the Dublin Core: title, description, and subject to provide standard metadata for web pages. The metadata also complies with the e-Government Metadata Standard in the UK. (http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/govtalk/schemasstandards/metadata.aspx)

Management of the scheme

ASA's Advicenow project manages the scheme - funded by the Legal Services Commission. A Core Consultative Panel is used to agree improvements and to update the scheme in response to changing legislation. The panel is made up of representatives from a range of organisations which use the CCS.

The panel meets twice a year to discuss and agree substantial changes with minor changes between meetings being agreed by email. Updated versions of the scheme are published twice year and are available free from the CCS section of Advicenow Better Information website - www.advicenow.org.uk/ccs.

The CCS today

The scheme continues to provide the structure that underpins ASA's Advicenow website and the Legal Services Commissions Community Legal Advice website.

Advicenow provides an aggregation service delivering a handpicked search of all the best information on rights and the law in England and Wales which is available on both sites. The CCS headings provide the menu structure on both Advicenow and CLA and the search on both sites uses the thesaurus to deliver information under the matching preferred terms.

The aim of this information service is to provide a short list of the best available information on any civil law related topic. People searching for information on a legal problem are likely to be stressed and anxious and should not have to sift through a mass of information from a search engine in order to find an answer to their problem. Most people are not in a position to assess whether information is correct, even though the consequences of using inaccurate information can be severe.

Advicenow's search provides a short list of accurate and up-to-date information for every CCS category and every item has been quality checked, summarised, classified and ranked.

The classification scheme with the thesaurus provides the basis of this tailored search. Without it the service would not exist.

What happened to metadata?

The one area of the scheme which has been less successful is its use as metadata on website pages. At the time the scheme was developed in 2002 there was interest in metadata as a step towards the semantic web and hope that accurate metadata on legal websites would improve the performance of search engines. In those pre-Google days search engines did not perform well and metadata promised an improvement. But less than scrupulous use of metadata to spoof search engines means that Google does not make use of it - and so the full potential of LAMS as metadata has not been realised.