Case Study: elevateIT at The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work

The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (hereinafter, the Agency) is a European Union public administration and one of the EU´s decentralised agencies in Europe. As a tripartite organisation, the Agency brings together representatives from three key decision-making groups in each of the EU Member States: governments, employers and workers´ organisations.

From it’s headquarters in Bilbao, Spain, the Agency acts as a catalyst for developing, collecting, analysing and disseminating information that improves the state of occupational safety and health in Europe. Internet and web services are key tools to support these activities. The Agency works in close co-operation with a network of partners, based on a system of “national Focal Points”. The Focal Point also manage the national Agency websites, which constitute the Agency’s network of websites, through their Internet representatives, who are also represented in one of the Agency’s experts group called “Internet group”.

The websites network of the Agency contains 33 national focal point websites based on a common model (graphical design and information structure). The websites were hosted on different servers residing in different countries. Since not all the Focal Points could host their national website, for technical resource or organisational reasons, some of them have been hosted by the Agency and managed remotely by national webmasters. This meant that the technical environment of the network of websites was variable: some websites were static, while others were maintained with a Content Management System (CMS).

The objective was therefore to develop a CMS-portal system based on ZOPE technologies for the deployment and maintenance of the network of websites, including national and institutional website, campaigning websites and the Europe portal website.

To make it easier to add, control and reuse information in different places of the Network, it was necessary to develop a method consistent for all participating institutions. It was also essential that the system provide support for multilingualism in user interface and content. It should be easily extendible to further languages and allow for a uniform way to store and classify all content of the partners of the Agency through the use of a multilingual thesaurus. An advanced publishing system was also required to facilitate publication of content in different languages and from different countries and institutions.

Users should be able to register and thereby have access to all sites of the Agency’s network of websites. To make it possible for users to specify their interests and wishes, a personalization feature had to be installed. Furthermore a “metadata-aware” search was needed to make precise searches throughout the whole network of websites available.

The core solution is based on elevateIT, an extension of proven ZOPE/Plone Content Management System, which serves the requirements of large decentralized organizations and enterprises. The Content Management functionalities of elevateIT facilitate complete web browser based creation and administration of information. Via portal functionality the users can interact with the system and other users and personalize contents and presentation. The system facilitates exchange of information between web servers providing relevant and latest information, which can be accessed across various websites.

One of the key features of elevateIT is multilingualism. The front end and the content of any web page can be presented in different languages. The Agency has developed a hierarchical thesaurus, containing over 2400 terms in 20 languages, which is used as a basis to categorise current and future information. Working together with elevateIT the translators of the thesaurus are assisted thru workflows and helper applications to keep various language versions consistent. It is possible to search for specific language versions and translators can look for documents that have not yet been translated or outdated translations of current documents.

The information on occupational health and safety on the national, institutional websites and the European portal is identified by extensive metadata, both Dublin Core and proprietary. The metadata system and the personalization function of elevateIT thereby facilitate aggregation, search and group specific information distribution – not just to the voluminous websites of the Agency but also to other web pages. A Workflow and Versioning solution allows flexible control of all information before publication. An LDAP Server is used for the centralized management of users providing “single point of log on”. The System furthermore allows easy adding and integrating new sites into the network of websites.

The customer is now able to delegate Content Management tasks from system administrators to content creators, as technical skills are no longer required to add and edit content. The control of the published information remains in the hands of privileged users, who are notified automatically, if information needs reviewing. By that the publication process of information is largely reduced. The centralized approach for managing users allows the Agency to offer personalized information and services like “notification of changes”. Syndication facilitates better presentation of information – not only on one website but throughout the whole Network of websites.

The search function retrieves more information, as it can search through the whole network of websites. In addition users can restrict the result list on relevant metadata, making the retrieved information more precise. The timely process for setting up new sites is greatly reduced, thus making it easy to create new campaign websites. The customer can now query the system for an overview of its state of translation and translators can easily find objects that need work. The system is ready for further extensions to the European Union.

After the integration and migration of the main websites and the Focal Point sites, the Agency has decided to develop further functionalities and migrate its own homepage to the new CMS portal system. SYSLAB.COM will make the necessary implementations and support the Agency via a helpdesk. If required, further content restructuring will take place within this cooperation.