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Chris Samuel, pictured (naturally) with a cup of tea here, has just posted this wonderfully cogent message regarding the importance of open standards in government IT.

In his message Chris discusses the BBC Domesday Project that was compiled 15 years ago; and highlights the huge task that was required in order to rescue the data from digital obsolescence. The rescue is documented here. Chris argues that such obsolesence is built in to all digital content that is not stored in open document formats, and points out that hundreds of years from now, this content will be an archaeological goldmine, if it is accessible.

For governemnt documents, this may be particularly important, and Chris likens the process to reading the handwriting and decyphering the language written in archaeological documents that have been found that date back many hundreds of years.

There are two critical differences between open and closed standards from an archaeological point. Firstly, there is a greater likelyhood that the specifications will survive along with the documents, because copies of the standards are disseminated worldwide. Secondly, because more people have to work with the document standards, there is more likely to be open discussion about how they work - as opposed to the more limited discussion that may be contained within the opaque corporate walls that govern proprietary standards.

Recalling the BBC Domesday Project

I recall the Domesday Project very well because my sixth-form college was fortunate enough to have one in the library. In the days before the Web, in the days even before CD-ROM encyclopedias, when the floppy disk was still more than enough for holding several school assignments at once (including code, libraries, and the essay), the Domesday Book, with it’s laserdisc crammed full of explorable data was the ultimate in interactivity.

My college was a 2 hour walk from home, so I used to catch a bus. The picture here (which is extracted from the online Domesday Book project) shows the village of Dunvant, and the postbox where we used to stand whilst waiting for the bus to arrive as it snaked it’s way from Bishopston to Gorseinon. In the background of the picture is the Ebeneezer Congregational Chapel, the birthplace of the Dunvant Male-Voice Choir.

The fact that we could sit in the library and see the place where we caught the bus to get to the library seems commonplace today, but back then there was nothing like it. The BBC Domesday Project was the future, it suggested how amazing and information-rich that future might be. It’s now almost 20 years since the project began and it’s sometimes a little hard to grasp how far technology has developed.

The internet has provided an information source that’s millions of times times more complex, with millions more authors than the domesday book could have ever dreamed of, but what’s beautiful about the domesday project is that it is a snapshot in time, and (thanks to a lot of work converting the data to open standards) it is today, as Chris alludes, available online for everyone to enjoy.