Standard issue
- Article 4 of 26
- M-iD, February 2004
The need to exchange digital information between organisations is creating demand for metadata that defines that information.
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These metadata schema also include keywords that make searching electronic systems for associated content easier, a capability that is also becoming more important as a result of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, due to come into force in January 2005 (for more on FOI, see the feature, Freedom to panic, in this issue). Under the act, government bodies are expected to supply citizens with information that they request within 20 days of a demand.
To speed up searches, metadata might also define whether the document falls under the FOI Act's purview, says Jon Fell of law firm Masons. “If you have an infinitely searchable system [based on document content, rather than metadata], you end up needing a room full of human beings to read all the documents the system throws up in order to see which are relevant. But if you have structured metadata in there, it allows you to cut down on that process because you can then take away certain documents because their metadata tells you they have nothing to do with the request,” he says.
While the FOI Act applies mainly to public sector bodies, any organisation with substantial dealings with the public sector also needs to comply. So financial services companies that pass information on to a public body such as the Financial Services Authority, for example, will potentially be obliged to answer relevant FOI queries.
Rules and regulations
While there are many groups that fall outside the FOI Act, other pieces of legislation are also forcing metadata up the information management agenda. The Data Protection Act already makes similar requirements of organisations that store data about individuals. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US is making proper audit trails mandatory for publicly listed companies and their international subsidiaries. Corporate governance measures are slowly being introduced in the UK and the financial services industry will soon have to meet the stringent requirements of the Basel II accord for demonstrating that risk assessment processes are in place. In all of these cases, operational metadata will need to be recorded and stored if companies are to demonstrate compliancy.
As more and more bodies become aware of the need both to meet legislation and to exchange information digitally, so metadata will become more important, as will metadata standards. But the onus will be on users to take the initiative - they should not rely too heavily on software suppliers to help out, warns Doug Laney, an analyst at IT industry research company, the Meta Group.
“Through 2003 and 2004, we will continue to witness a steady increase in enterprises ascribing elevated importance to understanding and controlling their information assets,” he says. But technology products are not keeping pace with that demand: “Enterprise repository products lag significantly in their ability to acquire metadata from a quorum of sources throughout an enterprise, and metadata-brokering technologies show promise but lack mechanisms to synchronise metadata,” he says. Further hindering effective metadata management, moreover, “is the implicit position among software vendors that exposing too much logic via metadata would enable migration to competitive solutions”.
Laney's advice is unequivocal: Metadata policies should be formulated by business users and enforced throughout an organisation. Only then will that organisation truly be able to understand and control its information assets.
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