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DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT - STANDARDS
 Standards,
both formal and informal (de facto) are important considerations
in acquiring any computer system, and document-imaging systems
are no different in this respect. The areas we will discuss in
this paper will be limited to optical disks, disk drives, scanners
and file formats.
Optical Disk and Disk Drive Standards
A common question is: When will we have standards to allow us
to exchange disks with other system users? Perhaps the best response
to this question is: Why do you want to exchange disks? Isn't
the inter-change of data what is really important? This is an
important distinction to make, as data is easily interchanged
with any of several media, but exchange of optical disks poses
many problems. In practical terms, when the requirements have
been examined closely, there are virtually no applications in
which office document images must be exchanged between two organizations.
It is the information content of the images that is important.
In those very few applications that require exchange of images,
primary storage media usually does not need to be exchanged; the
images can be exchanged on some agreed upon media (tape or another
format of optical disk) to and from which images are copied for
exchange.
It is an unfortunate reality that there are few de jure standards
in optical storage, and the ones that do exist are fairly loosely
worded. The table summarizes the standards situation for the commonly
available optical disk formats. Note that there are no de jure
WORM standards in place; this is expected to remain the case for
the fore seeable future, in as much as the marketplace is clearly
moving to rewritable media (usable in a write-once mode).
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Optical
Storage Standards
It should also be emphasized that the standards in place are
only physical standards, covering the method in which data
bits are physically written to the media, the size and format
of disk cartridges, and the like. These standards are similar
to those covering floppy disks - they define the media, but
not how it is used. The missing link in standards is logical
file formats. In one case, CD-ROM, these standards exist (the
so-called High Sierra.
Standard and ISO 9660) and allow CD-ROMs to be moved from
one computer platform to another and the data encoded on the
disc to be read (assuming, of course, that the appropriate
device drivers are present on both computers).
Given the lack of logical file format standards, two-document
imaging systems using identical drives and media still cannot
exchange disks and expect to read each other's data.
When interchange of data (as opposed to primary storage media)
is important, ISO standard media (typically 5 ¼ "
today) is the medium of choice. Both organizations have to
agree on programs that understand the logical organization
of the data on the disks. but they may choose drives from
different manufacturers if both drives adhere to the same
ISO standard. A second choice for data interchange is magnetic
tape (either 8mm helical scan using the de facto Exabyte standard
or the newer RDAT standard 4mm tape).
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