Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

eng
c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
— that works just as a digital hieroglyph, since only the company that has created it
can really understand its meaning. And, such as in the Egyptian example, there are
cases of companies that became extinct, leaving thousands of users with no access to
the information they had recorded on electronic documents.
These document formats were and are still used by software companies as boosters
for shortening hardware and software update cycles. A single update on the
standard document format is enough to force users to purchase the new version of
the application (and eventually a new computer) to access their information, which
is coded in proprietary formats: the digital hieroglyphs.
Once the software company has the control over the files’ format, it can also control
the flow of the information stored on these documents. This provides the technical
environment needed to enable any kind of intervention on the communication.
We own the information, but we don’t have control over the document format.
When discussing the transition from the current syntactic web to the semantic
web we are going to face in a few years, it is important to notice that the access to
information is a primary requisite for every information organization model. It is
impossible to index, analyze and reference any information that can’t be accessed, so
the use of an open document format is a basic condition for information exchange
and use in every environment. However, just using an open format is not enough.
The selection of an open standard is essential.
Over the last years we have seen the definition of what can be considered an
open standard becoming more and more comprehensive, in order to accommodate
every specification available on Internet, and that is why it is important to bear in
mind what actually is an open standard.
The definition used by e-Ping 3 (the Brazilian government reference on interoperability
and electronic government) is the one created by the European Union 4 ,
which defines open standards as those that were developed by a transparent process,
open and accessible to all the stakeholders; that have specification documentation
published and available to any of those stakeholders; that allow for an implementa-
3. “e-PING: Padrões de Interoperabilidade de Governo Eletrônico” (e-PING: Interoperability Standards
for eGovernment), version of 2010, p. 50 (http://www.governoeletronico.gov.br/anexos/e-pingversao-2010).
4. European Interoperability Framework for pan-European eGovernment Services, version 1.0
(2004), ISBN 92-894-8389-X, p. 9 (http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/3761).
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