Beware metadata.Research by UK software company Workshare has cast light onto poor working practices in terms of how we create, work on, save, and distribute content. In particular, the survey illustrates the scale of a problem that we are all aware of but it would appear that few of us understand the full ramifications--more often than not, when we create a 'new' document, we actually base it on an existing one. In actual fact, the survey alleges that 900% of corporate documents started life as some other similar document. So, you might well ask, what is the problem with this? It is often easier and faster to open an old document and then perform the old 'File, Save As' trick to get the new document up and running than it would be to start from scratch to start (again) from the very beginning; also, to start without resources. - Thackeray. See also: Scratch . The problem, lies in the metadata (1) (meta-data) Data that describes other data. The term may refer to detailed compilations such as data dictionaries and repositories that provide a substantial amount of information about each data element. Comment Metadata is brilliant stuff--it contains huge amounts of wonderful, contextual information about document revisions, property changes, and people that have worked on the content. This is all well and ~if your working practices are honest and true. But, as the UK Government recently found out to its cost, metadata can carry a nasty punch where working practices are, shall we say, less than scrupulous scru·pu·lous adj. 1. Conscientious and exact; painstaking. See Synonyms at meticulous. 2. Having scruples; principled. ! The now infamous in·fa·mous adj. 1. Having an exceedingly bad reputation; notorious. 2. Causing or deserving infamy; heinous: an infamous deed. 3. Law a. dossier "Iraq--Its Infrastructure of Concealment Concealment See also Refuge. Ali Baba 40 thieves concealed in oil jars. [Arab. Lit.: Arabian Nights] ark of bulrushes Moses hidden in basket to escape infanticide. [O.T. , Deception deception n. the act of misleading another through intentionally false statements or fraudulent actions. (See: fraud, deceit) and Intimidation', a document intended to display significant timely intelligence, was found to have been based on a 12-year-old PhD thesis (as in a thesis from the early 1990's, not one written by a 12 year old!). Sources close to the Government went to great lengths to feign feign v. feigned, feign·ing, feigns v.tr. 1. a. To give a false appearance of: feign sleep. b. ignorance, only to be undermined by metadata. The document was posted to the Web as a Word file. A simple mining of the metadata (in this case user names) associated with the revisions proved that the document had been worked on by key Governmental personnel. Our contention, backed up by the Workshare survey, is that organisations are exposing themselves to potentially damaging breaches, both from the point of view of security and of the law. A poor understanding of metadata, what it does and how it works, is clearly a significant problem. www.butlergroup.com |
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