Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

Who Owns Your Documents?

Smoke, Mirrors and Silence: The Browser Wars Reignite.  This slash-dotted ditty has a lot to say about the difficulty of choosing and honoring standards in what is most important to many of us: the preservation of content and the information conveyed therein.  Because we use technology, lots of technology, as the enabler and mediator of access, the impact of tool choices and conflicting agendas can become invisible and problematic.

I don't subscribe to the attributions of motive and attitude that Nigel McFarlane peppers throughout his 2004-05-28 informIT article.  I do think that cognizance of the support for public standards, especially involving data and interchange formats, is important.  I am not sure how one accomplishes that in a commoditized community like the World-Wide Web.  The more there is to preserve and sustain over time and across purposes, the more that accountability for compliance with open standards will matter.  This is what led me to create DMware, with AIIM support.  It is the basis for my continuing tepid efforts there and for the nfoWare initiative.

The greatest challenge seems to be equipping those who are concerned about the preservation of their electronic documents and interchangeable materials with ways to confirm and safely apply standards-compliant tools in support of what they really care about.  The approach I favor is to demystify the plumbing and then demonstrate how to achieve useful results while de-risking the life cycle of our documents and other electronic materials.
posted by orcmid at 5/31/2004 07:21:16 AM