AIIM Standards Watch

StratML

In December, we announced the initiation of the StratML project. The committee has held a couple of meetings to work on the schema elements needed for transforming organizational strategic plans into the StratML format. The current focus of the committee is on the validation of the StratML elements. You can review at:

· The names and definitions of the elements in the StratML core outlined in Appendix C of the document available at: StratML Summary and Results White Paper

· The names and definitions of the elements in the StratML performance plans and report framework available at: StratML Performance Plans

Standards Week 2008

AIIM's Standards Week 2008 is now a piece of history. We had 7 committees hold meetings last week while we were in Boston for the AIIM Exposition and Conference. It was great to see so many friends.

Now for an overview of some of the activities of the week...

The US TAG (Technical Advisory Group) to ISO TC 171 held a meeting during which they reviewed the progress against commitments that had been made during the last ISO meeting in London. Significant progress is being made on all the tasks so that during the next meeting to be held in Beijing we will have very good discussions.

Implementation Guidelines - This committee began work on the next version of the popular ARP-1 document and discussed methods of getting additional adoption of the document and listed standards by the states.

iECM - The committee has many projects it is trying to work on. The focus of the committee will be on metadata. Given that there are many metadata projects being worked on by numerous groups, the committee discussed how to bring the work together to ensure that we do not have opposing efforts.

Evidentiary Support - This committee has been dormant for a while but is being revived to focus on record authenticity issues. It is being lead by Bob Williams, Cohasset and Paul Doyle, Proofspace and Sedona Group. They will be looking into producing some white papers and best practices as well as sharing evidentiary support information through blogs.

DIQP - The DIQP (Digital Image Quality and Preservation) committe heard presentations from Charles Dollar and Rick Laxman on preservation issues. Charles spoke on his ongoing research in the area and Rick shared what the Church's Family History Division is doing to preserve and provide access to their very old records.

C27 (Document Management) - In addition to discussions on various projects, this committee discussed the use of blu-ray disks for document imaging. As a result of the discussion, AIIM will be having a letter sent to OSTA, Optical Storage Technology Association, requesting that they focus on promoting the standardization of blu-ray disks.

PDF/UA (Universal Access) - The committee made good progress on their document and is planning to have it available before the meetings in Beijing which means they have a very aggressive committee meeting schedule to follow. They have made significant progress and feel it is now time to get other prespectives included in the standard.

While PDF Healthcare did not meet in Boston during Standards Week, they did hold their normally scheduled bi-weekly conference call.

We hope to see you at a Standards meeting soon!

PDF Reference as Standard

In December, we announced that the PDF Reference as an ISO standard (ISO 32000) was approved with one negative. After a meeting in January, the international working group was able to resolve the negative comment so that the negative vote was changed from Negative to Affirmative with Comment. This change means that the standard is fully approved and will be published soon.

After dealing with the comments, the working group began discussions on the next version of the standard by identifying features that should be included in the next version of the standard. The following are some of the ideas the committee is discussing for future versions of ISO 32000:

3D, CAD, Engineering

• Incorporate the 3D algorithm, PRC into Part 1
  
• Improved measurement, 3D, focus on CAD
  
• Non-Scaling lines and patterns
  
• GIS features
  

Document Features

• Extensions to portable collections (packages)
  
• Hyperlinks on objects and not an area
  
• Use of native Unicode in PDF page content streams
  
• Root-level dictionary of all used resources
  
• Clarification of resourced inheritance when rendering
  
• Associate annotations (especially comments) directly with page content
  
• Improved file provenance and "audit trails"
  
• Per-page metadata
  

Accessiblity

• MathML Integration
  
• New Tag Types
  

Color

• Enable N-Colorant ICC profiles as source profiles
  
• Output intent enhancement
  
• Black Point Compensation
  
• Add processing instruction for color conversion
  
• Support for DeviceLink profiles
  
• Specify exactly how color has to be rendered on an output device
  
• No more uncalibrated color in a PDF
  
• Extend color model for better support of spot colors and overprints between spot colors (and with process colors)
  

Architecture

• Remove or improve cross-referencing via XRef table
  
• Move to an XML coded file
  
• Multiple levels of data
  
• Support for Newspaper XML document instances and related style-sheets

If you would like to contribute thoughts on the above items or have features you would like to recommend be included in a future version of ISO 32000, Document management – Portable Document Format (PDF), please feel free to send your questions and/or recommendations to bfanning@aiim.org. If you would like to participate in this effort of revising the PDF file format, please let us know that as well by sending an email to bfanning@aiim.org.

PDF/Archive Training

AIIM announces the availability of training on PDF/Archive. The PDF/A training provides you with a solid understanding of PDF/A and the standard ISO 19005-1, Document management – File format for the long-term preservation of electronic document – Part 1: Use of PDF 1.4 (PDF/A-1). The course will cover the technologies and best practices that help you to implement PDF/A in your organization so that you can preserve your electronic documents.

Some of the specific topics that will be covered include:

• Preservation
• Preservation Problem
• Overview of ERM
• Overview of file formats
• PDF/A Introduction
• Digital Signatures in preservation
• Overview of conformance levels and restricted features
• Color
• Metadata for preservation
• Workflow and migration for long-term preservation
• Conformance levels and issues
• Creating PDF/A documents from digitally born documents
• Scanning to PDF/A (converting images to PDF/A)
• Validating PDF/A files
• Implementation best practices
• Selecting PDF/A products
• Relevance of other PDF standards to PDF/A
• Legal and compliance implications of PDF/A

The training is available as private classes that can be tailored to your organization's specific needs. Additionally, we will be offering public training classes in several locations. Please watch the AIIM web site for a location near you and for the introduction of the web-based version of this training.

If you would like to have more information on this training, please contact Betsy Fanning at bfanning@aiim.org.

Standards Watch Blog

The Standards Watch Blog is back!

The AIIM Standards department has been busy with a number of meetings and documents. Over the next couple of weeks, we want to catch you up on the items we have been working on and let you know about some exciting projects that are coming up.

Last week, we held several committee meetings in Boston during the 2008 AIIM Exposition and Conference. Highlights from the meetings will be posted later this week.

As a preview, we have started the StratML effort, begun work on the next version of PDF/A and PDF standards, and PDF/Engineering is in the final stage prior to being published and made available to the public. The Implementation Guidelines committee that creates the AIIM ARP-1 document which many of you have downloaded is beginning work on the next version of this document. Watch this blog for more details on these and other standards projects.