B.      Preserving Access and Use of Documents -- Using Standards to Secure Document Ownership

I am interested in establishing an open foundation that allows commercial products to add high value and support customers and also preserve interoperability and interchange with different products.  I am also thinking about how to ensure that legacy can be preserved even when software products, platforms, and media change.  It is interesting to me to consider how to preserve access to material produced under earlier versions of user's information model.

This is a major theme for me, and I have been hiding out about it. 

1.      Having access and use of electronic documents be preserved over time by reliance on industry standards and open implementations.  This applies to documents, to records, and to their management and preservation over time.  We are talking about completely open and standardized processes for the end-to-end lifecycle of individual electronic documents and their collections.  This extends prospects for open interchange of documents among collections and across platforms.  The basic premise is that every electronic document is potentially a legacy document from the moment of its creation.

The idea is that there always be a practical way to access and recover the content of their electronic documents whether or not they still have the originating application or the computer on which the originating application ran.  Although proprietary and commercial tools may be the most appealing for daily creation, modification, and usage of documents, there are always elementary tools and specifications by which the material can be recovered using openly-available public tools for that purpose.   Along with this, there are ways to confirm and certify interoperability


-- Dennis

Dennis E. Hamilton
AIIM DMware Technical Coordinator
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