HR Metadata

HR Metadata is a wiki that describes the metadata of IT systems used in the HR processes of the Dutch national government. It implements the ISO 11179 model. It can be used to store definitions (meaning), ownership, form and other attributes of the data used in a variety of situations. It is especially important in situations where common definitions are misused, misunderstood or ill-defined. In those situations, you might get a confusion of tongues. Even for a simple metric like the number of staff (or its full-time equivalent, FTE), this may or may not include people outside the regular staff, people hired for less than a year, people hired with a zero-hour contract, people currently on sick leave, etc.; all combinations have been used.

The wiki was built in 2013 and 2014 by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations. The project team contains a number of people known within the SMW community, including Toine Schijvenaars, Remco de Boer (ArchiXL) Ad Strack van Schijndel (Wikibase Solutions) and Tom Kronenburg (PBLQ).



The HR Metadata user community consists of information managers, IT-architects process designers and other information specialists. So far we have about 80 registered users, of whom about half are contributing. The goal is that this becomes a tool for the full community of information report designers, architects, process designers and BI-experts in the Dutch National Government.

Semantic MediaWiki
We used SMW because it gives us a very high degree of control over our product and allowed us to skin the product entirely according to a high set of standards (both in terms of design, as well as accessibility for visually impaired). Overall, this solution is also much cheaper than any competing software. We use SMW to store all the elements required by the ISO 11179 metadata standard are stored in SMW. Meaning, ownership, and form of the data that the tool describes.

Other extensions
We used a number of other extensions, both standard and proprietary. The most notable is the skin, but we also use a tool for smart publishing. We solved the ‘rights’ issue by creating two wikis. On ontwikkel.hrmetadata.nl only a select few can view and edit data. When the editors decide a set of pages is correct, they set the status of the pages to a certain status, after which those pages are copied (nightly) to www.hrmetadata.nl. The pages on www.hrmetadata.nl cannot be edited, but are viewable by everyone. This extension is called SmartPublish (proprietary - ArchiXL).

Also, we had the problem that pages could have similar names. We needed to give pages a number that is unique as the title, but show a different title. For this, we used the extension SemanticTitle.

Finally, we created the extension BZKSearch, a faceted search based on the wiki search engine, that allows us to filter (and sort) search results by category and a specific property value.