Piper Cole's Weblog

It's 2015, Do You Know Where Your Data Is...and more importantly: Can You Read It? As those of us who have used a computer for a number of years know, your data is useful and usable only to the extent that you can a) find it, and b) read it. Over the years, applications, each with their own proprietary data formats, have come and gone, and when they go, your data might just as well have gone with them, because you can't access it without the application that created it. Enter a new concept: a document format that can be freely (in both senses of the term) adopted by anyone, that was developed in an open process, and that will outlive any one application. When that document format is developed and approved by a vendor-independent standards body, then users get the best of all worlds: freedom of choice to select from a number of applications that adopt the standard and access to their data that survives any particular application. Doesn't this embody the essence of both competition and convenience? Isn't this the direction we should be going: toward freedom of choice and away from being locked to a particular "thing", whether that thing is an object (e.g. desktop computer, handheld) or an application? True freedom in a computing sense is the ability to keep and access your information, even when you change your device, application, or physical location. (To learn more about this issue, please read Tim Bray's response to Microsoft's opposition.) It makes perfect logical sense that, once we have this standard, governments, which are often our ultimate record keepers, should require that those records be kept in a format that ensures their continued availability. This is exactly what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has done, and I salute them for it. In a bold move, that is not without the controversy that always comes from being first, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has proposed mandating a standard document format for all documents produced and/or stored by the state by January 2007. What the state is doing here is saying, "Hey, this is our data, and we want to ensure that we can read it in the future." If you ask me, that's a pretty good idea. My only question is: why aren't more governments doing this?