culture.gov.au
Connecting you with Australian culture online
Top 10 Stories
Australian weather and the seasons The Australian Gold Rush European discovery and the colonisation of Australia Sydney Olympic Games, 2000 Convicts and the British colonies in Australia Great Barrier Reef Australian Indigenous cultural heritage The Great Depression Modern Australian fashion Australian food and drinkWhat are the technical features of the Culture and Recreation Portal website?
Search engine
The Culture and Recreation Portal uses Verity's Portal One index engine using a PERL based spider to collect the pages. Its search results are generated via TopicScript scripts. All data held about websites is maintained in a MySQL database via a PERL-based Zyview system customised for the project by WebTrax. Using the specially developed search interface, visitors can search across the 4,200 cultural websites' 3,220,000 screens.
A unique feature of the website is that every website page has metadata attached to it during indexing. Users can find pages based on the information held about the website, for example title and location, as well as the content of the screen. They can also get a free site search to put on their own website.Metadata
The database is now configured to conform with the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) Metadata Standard which is based on the internationally accepted Dublin Core Standard. For more detail about the information management practices of the Culture and Recreation Portal, please see our Metadata and Culture and Recreation Thesaurus pages.
Hardware and software
For the real tech-heads!
The website runs on a Dell 2850 2 rack-unit server co-located at a hosting centre with a high-speed
link to the Internet. There are 2 CPU's each running at 3600Mhz,
with over 120 Gigabytes of hard disk space set up in a RAID array, and
over 2,000MByte of RAM.
The server runs the Windows 2003 operating system.
Administration and back-end functions are run on a similarly configured Dell 2550 server.
Apache 2.0 is used as the web server.
MySQL is the database used to maintain details about the pages indexed.
Zyview (a PERL based web database admin system customised for the project
by WebTrax) is used for administration of the website details.
Stalker's Communigate Pro is used as the mailing list server for
our 2 mailing lists.
Pilot Software's HitList Professional is used for production of statistics
reports.
Dreamweaver is used for HTML authoring. Photoshop 7.0 is used for development
and manipulation of graphics.
Accessibility
To provide an optimum viewing experience for all users, including those with disabilities, site content is developed in conformance with level Triple-A of W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, which requires conformance with all Priority 1, Priority 2, and Priority 3 checkpoints defined in the Guidelines. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities.
As a pre-requisite of attaining this level of conformance, pages are authored using Cascading Style Sheets at Version 2 (CSS2). Separate style sheets are provided for both screen and print display to tailor the look of the content appropriately. For example, menu items are not displayed when pages are printed.
The site is optimised for access by both Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers.
If you can see this message, you are probably not seeing this site in the way it was designed. This site uses cascading style sheets (CSS2) to control the way in which elements are displayed on the page.
You will still be able to access everything in this site, but we do recommend you upgrade your browser to a more recent, standards compliant, browser.