While e-government provides increasing opportunities for people to access information and services with more ease, speed and efficiency, a frustrating stumbling block has been hit by many who try to do so.

The results of a survey by CCW Research, a leading IT consulting firm, that were released on November 7 say that various levels of government have been registering domain names in an ad hoc fashion that makes their sites harder to find and leaves potential for great confusion.

According to internationally-accepted protocols, the obvious domain name-ending for government websites should be "gov.cn." But many use suffixes that make them sound more like social organizations or even businesses, says the report.

For example, the provincial government site of Guizhou is "gzgov.gov.cn." Qinghai Province uses "qhinfo.com," a suffix used by private enterprises.

Use of pinyin is also not standardized; some use entire words whilst others use abbreviations.

So the provincial government site of Fujian is, predictably, "fujian.gov.cn," but Jilin's is "jl.gov.cn." Nearly half of the provincial government websites are named the latter way, which is prone to cause ambiguity. For example, "hn.gov.cn" is neither the provincial website of Henan nor Hunan, but the site of the Science and Technology Bureau of Huainan in Anhui Province.

Analyst Qu Xiaodong from CCW Research said the lack of standardization of government domain names reflects a lack of awareness of public usability -- a central point of e-government -- among the people constructing these sites.

(China.org.cn by Zhang Tingting, November 14, 2004)