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The value of public sector information can be significantly increased by employing standards. For example, the use of a metadata standard for describing governmental resources allows citizens and businesses to locate and retrieve these resources in a more efficient and effective way. Furthermore, the use of a common document template for describing elementary and integrated public services (such as life events) can also substantially improve management and reuse of information and increase citizens' satisfaction. This paper proposes ametadata element set for governmental resources and a template for describing life events and public services. The proposed metadata element set can be used to facilitate the search and retrieval of governmental resources such as electronic documents. The proposed document template, termed the Governmental Markup Language (GovML), is a recommendation for describing public services and life events. It is anticipated that both public organizations and consumers of public services (citizens, businesses and other public organizations) would benefit from such a common information structure. Public authorities will be able to better manage (i.e., create, modify, store, etc.), exchange and reuse their information. Citizens and businesses will enjoy better services when searching for information regarding public services and life events. From amore technical perspective, GovML data vocabularies are proposed XML patterns, validated against an appropriate XML schema. Interoperability among public authorities is ensured as the rules that dominate the document syntax are common. Moreover, GovML-compliant information exploitsXMLpotential; thus it can be displayed in multiple formats and devices, such as Web browsers, PDAs and mobile phones. © 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.