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EPA Web Taxonomy
The EPA Web Taxonomy allows various audiences easy access to find relevant information from EPA programs quickly, by using a common vocabulary to describe EPA web content. EPA developed a more sustainable approach to developing and maintaining enterprise taxonomies that involves factoring out the discrete facets (people, places, organizations, and things), maintaining them as separate controlled vocabularies, and tagging content using the facets in combination.This new taxonomy is housed in the Agency Environmental Terminology System and Services (ETSS).
EPA's Web site contains over 500,000 documents in HTML, PDF, and other formats. While search engines can find very specific information quite well, many of the searches performed on EPA's Web site are very general and return thousands of results. Many times the right document does not appear in the first couple of pages of relevant documents. To improve access to EPA documents, the EPA's Web Registry (formerly known as the Web Inventory) has been developed to ensure that the most appropriate items come out near the top of a search results list.
This tool also supports navigation of EPA materials by topic, further enhancing access to EPA's documents. Web Registry records are used to produce dynamically generated Web pages, creating a "browse" list which offers the public the chance to navigate our site by "topic." Program and Topics-based sites can utilize this information to dynamically generate pages with links, descriptions, etc., within their own sites.
The Web Registry is an Oracle database and a Cold Fusion application used to create and edit records for the database. The database is designed to contain one record for each substantive item on EPA's public Web site. This record is referred to as a "metadata" record, because metadata is defined as "data about data." The Web Registry records contain data about EPA's Web sites (data).
Each record contains information about a Web page, including the title of the item, who wrote it, when it was written, where it is located, etc. Legislative and regulatory citations, geographic information, chemical abstract numbers, and other information about the Web page can also be included in the record. All of this information can be used as part of public searches of the Web site.
