Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

November 26, 2013

The curse of NOARK

Filed under: Archives,Design,Standards — Patrick Durusau @ 10:18 am

The curse of NOARK by Lars Marius Garshol.

From the post:

I’m writing about a phenomenon that’s specifically Norwegian, but some things are easier to explain to foreigners, because we Norwegians have been conditioned to accept them. In this case I’m referring to the state of the art for archiving software in the Norwegian public sector, where everything revolves around the standard known as NOARK.

Let’s start with the beginning. Scandinavian chancelleries have a centuries-long tradition for a specific approach to archiving, which could be described as a kind of correspondence journal. Essentially, all incoming and outgoing mail, as well as important internal documents, were logged in a journal, with title, from, to, and date for each document. In addition, each document would be filed under a “sak”, which translates roughly as “case” or “matter under consideration”. Effectively, it’s a kind of tag which ties together one thread of documents relating to a specific matter.

The classic example is if the government receives a request of some sort, then produces some intermediate documents while processing it, and then sends a response. Perhaps there may even be couple of rounds of back-and-forth with the external party. This would be an archetypal “sak” (from now on referred to as “case”), and you can see how having all these documents in a single case file would be absolutely necessary for anyone responding to the case. In fact, it’s not dissimilar to the concept of an issue in an issue-tracking system.

In this post and its continuation in Archive web services: a missed opportunity Lars details the shortcomings of the NOARK standard.

To some degree specifically Norwegian but the problem of poor IT design is truly an international phenomena.

I haven’t made any suggestions since the U.S. is home to the virtual case management debacle, the incredible melting NSA data center, not to mention the non-functional health care IT system known as HeathCare.gov.

Read these posts by Lars because you will encounter projects before mistakes similar to the ones Lars describes have been set in stone.

No guarantees of success but instead of providing semantic data management on top of a broken IT system, you could be providing semantic data management on top of a non-broken IT system.

Perhaps never a great IT system but I would settle for a non-broken one any day.

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