The XML Battle is Over. The XML Battle Has Just Begun.
by Kurt Leafstrand on March 27th, 2008
Craig Ball’s visibility and prominence in the e-discovery space is akin to Brangelina’s in the world of pop culture. So, chances are that those of you who track the space closely have already read his recent post on XML and its still-unproven potential in e-discovery.
Craig does a fantastic job of summarizing why XML has huge potential to ease the exchange of e-discovery content — as well as why significant challenges still lie ahead before we can all leave our custom load files formats, conversion tools, and scripts behind and head to the beach.
Why are standards efforts in general, and the e-discovery effort in particular, so complex? There are two reasons: one is about people and process, and other is about technology. To borrow a page from Google, and quote the person (Joe Kraus) leading Open Social, a standards effort in the social networking world: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”
How true. Those involved with the EDRM XML effort are well aware that it took two full years of hard work and many, many iterations just to get to the 1.0 version of the specification, which, as all involved would readily acknowledge, primarily just addresses the biggest pain point that customers and providers face today: load file interchange. Ironically, some in the blogosphere have accused the EDRM effort of not being connected enough with larger international standards bodies. The truth, as usual, is far more complex and nuanced. Not much was happening on the wider standards front, and after repeated attempts to help jump-start those efforts, George Socha, Tom Gelbmann and a host of EDRM participants decided it was time to move the ball forward on their own – and were remarkably successful in that effort, achieving compliance across most of the major players in the industry. Now, with the wind at their backs, the EDRM group is planning the next iteration of the spec and will certainly be reaching out to other interested standards bodies as a part of that effort.
On the technology front, the bottom line is that there’s still a long way to go to figure out how to incorporate actual document content into the EDRM XML schema. There are also a lot of interesting open questions around areas such as interoperability that the XML group plans to take up at the big annual EDRM meeting in St. Paul in May.
In the most general sense, XML’s a done deal: The world is moving toward one in which all content is digitally encoded and marked up with metadata. It’s inevitable. However, in the e-discovery specific sense, our industry is just getting started, and it’s going to take unified, concerted effort across the spectrum of e-discovery providers and end-users to make Craig love XML.
