The importance of being earnest about standards
Nice to see someone's government IT is committed to standards being, well, standardised:
Such a key element of a government (any!) digital preservation strategy, yet I do not see SocITM or the CIO Council (UK equivalent bodies to some of the signatories of Consegi) even showing interest in standards let alone this level. Despite European regulation that requires them to exchange files in standard formats to facilitate interoperability.
The UK in general seems very blind to the other problem the use of good standards helps, that of digital preservation and access. The use of a good standard file format for the files you want to preserve and make accessible is invaluable. More or less a prerequisite. It's not complicated. Use a binary format that is undocumented and the only way to gain access with a high degree of success it is to use the software that created it. That software will still be around in 5 years? 50? 500?
Documents produced in the last major information revolution have survived over 600 years and are still readable. Gutenberg's Movable type printing method mass-produced information widening access to knowledge; by using standards, in this case languages, printed documents have survived the centuries. Documents produced at the beginning of the next major information revolution, the IT one we are still living through, have already been rendered unreadable. No Rosetta stone exists to be discovered that will help translate these electronic hieroglyphs in the future. The information they contain is lost.
What can be done to raise awareness of this problem? How to get UK national and local government organisations to recognise and vocalise the problem? The solution of using standard formats is there and standards are starting to emerge in many areas; but before anyone will apply them they first need to recognise the problem they are blindly creating.
Posted at 04:11AM Sep 02, 2008 by Chris Puttick in Open Standards |