As governments, businesses, and organizations around the world increasingly convert their information flows from paper-based to digital, there is an increasing need for electronic records management. In the United States, the functionality standard, DoD 5015.2, "Design Criteria Standard for Electronic Records Management Software Applications" (text) provides a detailed specification of the capabilities required of document management systems to meet government electronic records management needs. DoD 5015.2 is used by the DISA Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) to perform certification testing to ensure that systems can meet the requirements stated in the standard.
DoD 5015.2 lists numerous metadata items, covering such issues as content disposition, bibliographic metadata, formatting, email-specific metadata, and others. While 5015.2 provides a detailed description of the semantics of each metadata item, it does not describe the format of their contents. As a result, even if two document management systems both meet the 5015.2 standard, there is no guarantee that values from one system can be easily transferred or compared with another. Since 5015.2 only specifies functionality, it is not a solid foundation for interoperability among electronic records management systems.
The purpose of this workshop is to begin efforts to create an interoperability standard for electronic records management metadata. Topics for discussion at the workshop include: