The ESD toolkit is best defined as the Thesaurus for Public Sector information. The controlled lists within the toolkit have been defined specifically for the Public Sector and have been maintained and enhanced (and continue to be so) by that community. The lists provides for a standard approach to defining local government information structures, content, services, terms and linkages.

SearchLight has been built around the ESD standards and automatically brings the power of that resource to all of your information access channels by easy integration with CRM, CMS, EDRMS and back office database systems.

The powerful and sophisticated matching algorithms within Searchlight automate the whole process of exploiting the benefits of the ESD lists to provide a consistent standards driven approach to the referencing of all sources of content (both structured and unstructured) and methods of retrieval of information.

SearchLight uses the ESD standards for:

• Classification of all content sources (web, documents, applications) to enable:
  • e-gms compliant and meaningful metadata to be automatically applied
  • Generation of Taxonomy based (and full content) indexes to enable sophisticated retrieval of information
  • Identification of relevant Service area for each piece of content
  • Automatic Generation of LocalDirectGov XML
  • Automatic building of A-Z lists automatically derived from Council content
  • Joining up of content across authorities and other Public Bodies
• Interpretation and expansion of Search terms to enable Intelligent Searching
• Analysis of content stores (e.g. web pages) to identify weak content by; Service area, LG category, A-Z entry
  

SearchLight’s mission is to ensure that all content is accurately, consistently and automatically referenced whilst, also, ensuring that Searches are intelligently interpreted to bring back the most relevant content no matter how the questions is asked.

The objective is to enable the council to use its vast resource of information to serve the citizen more effectively (both in terms of quality of and cost of service) through whatever channel the citizen chooses to interact with the council.

SearchLight completely removes the need for the costly, inconsistent and often inaccurate manual (or even semi manual) content referencing.

For more information on the ESD toolkit please go to:

http://www.esd.org.uk