The role of industry regulations

[nurmohammadkhan]

Some metadata, therefore, must never be missing, because their presence is essential to recover documents; others must be present because they serve as a guarantee of the integrity of the document, others still because they contextualize it and help to place it correctly with respect to other documents.

But beyond this, some simply cannot be missing because they are imposed by specific regulations , precisely because of their very important role.

The AgID guidelines on the formation, management and conservation of electronic documents identify a precise set of minimum mandatory metadata that must be associated with electronic documents, electronic administrative documents and electronic document aggregations (such as electronic files, for example). The minimum mandatory metadata must always be present, in order to guarantee conservation in accordance with the law.

In some cases, specific sector regulations intervene , which are added to the guidelines of the Agency for Digital Italy.

This is the case of the aforementioned documents with fiscal and tax relevance, such as invoices, transport documents (DDT), orders, books and accounting records. In this case, some regulations such as Presidential Decree 600/72 and the Ministerial Decree of 17 June 2014, provide precise indications on the methods of conservation of these categories of documents and also on the metadata. In particular, the Ministerial Decree of 17 June 2014, in article 3 establishes that among the metadata associated with these particular documents there must be at least the name and surname, name, tax code, VAT number, date, when this information is mandatory in the document itself. This is because this information and the associations between them are considered essential to guarantee the recovery of the documents and their rapid presentation to the authorities.

This is a simple example, to show how industry regulations often intervene tunisia whatsapp resource by providing precise indications, which must be kept in mind when talking about compliant digital preservation .



The impact of the new AgID Guidelines
The recent entry into force of the new AgID Guidelines on electronic documents has brought the topic of metadata back into the spotlight.

The new Guidelines, in fact, have modified the system of minimum mandatory metadata to be associated with the electronic document, which until now had been rather limited and limited to 6 mandatory metadata. The new regulation effectively doubles the number of minimum metadata, requiring the valorization of many new information, not always easy to identify for all organizations.

This massive change has required companies and specialized conservators to make major upgrades to their systems in order to be able to manage the new structure.



Beyond the minimum mandatory metadata
Of course, in addition to the minimum metadata imposed by the various regulations, it is always possible to include additional information in our metadata set, which may be useful within a specific business context and to support additional search, management or structural functions.

At the same time, when we intend to enrich a set of metadata with additional elements, it is good to at least adhere to some basic criteria , to avoid seeing the fields proliferate beyond what is necessary and to unnecessarily complicate the structure.

First of all, it is good to ask ourselves what are the functions that we need to guarantee or, for example, the search keys that we use most to retrieve a specific type of document and therefore, rationally, what metadata are needed. Some of this information is probably already part of the set of minimum metadata, such as the date or the subject; others, perhaps specifically linked to the context or consolidated company practices, could be missing and it could be useful to insert them.

However, the rule “less is more” often applies: it is useless to add a lot of information that we will never or almost never use to search for that particular document, it is better to focus on a few but significant pieces of information. A structure that is too rich and complex, in the long run, can become difficult to manage and can prove counterproductive, needlessly complicating the work of operators and increasing the risk of errors.

Finally, it is good to assign to the metadata that we intend to add some “labels”, that is, some names, that make it immediately clear what we are talking about and what information we should expect from that metadata. This is fundamental for several reasons.

First, it makes the operators' work easier and reduces the risk of configuration or compilation errors .

Second, when we move into the world of digital preservation , clarity is crucial. If we need to move our archives from one custodian to another, perhaps after a few years, using unclear metadata could cause many problems and undermine the degree of interoperability and comprehensibility of the preservation package indexes , making the tasks to be performed more difficult