Is the open standards movement as significant a development as open source? Does it translate in opportunities for you, or is standards work a barrier to free software development? Are standards-development bodies the right places to engage in software development? Should you get involved, or are standards forums a waste of time, slow and bureaucratic, and a distraction from open source development opportunities?

The participants on this panel will share with you their diverse practical experience with open standards and open source development, and they will welcome an animated exchange of opinions. Bring your questions and comments, engage with the experts, and judge for yourself how open standards can help to move technology forward.

Standards in the Real World

What are standards and why are they important? How are they created? How do standards affect you, not just as a software developer but also as a citizen? How can you participate in their development?

This track will address these and related questions through a panel discussion and four short presentations touching on many aspects of the standards-development process. From human to computer languages, currency and measurement to food and drink, laws and statutes to voting and elections, website design and equality of access to archeology, digital imaging, and file formats, standards touch our lives every day.

These sessions will inform and engage you, and will present standards in a new light

Standards Best Practices in Digital Preservation

This talk will take a holistic approach to comprehensive work flows that integrate best practices of standards in digital preservation, with the diverse standards of practice for documenting cultural heritage sites worldwide, emphasizing the following domains:

• Data acquisition and recording techniques for Cultural Heritage
• Documentation and Spatial Information Management
• Standards and documentation for Cultural Heritage
• Internet-based Cultural Heritage applications
• e-Libraries and e-Learning in Cultural Heritage
• Reports, activities and Integration of related disciplines and techniques

What standards of practice mind both sides of the cultural/digital gap? Where are the decision-points in preservation workflows and what are the alternatives? What technological solutions are of lowest risk and highest impact for heritage documentation? The paper points to real-world standards in practice that are effective and are ether in practice or under development.

While best practices and standards are useful when followed, the majority of legacy information for cultural heritage is squirreled away in hard drives, outdated software applications and outmoded methodologies. We raise this issue for discussion and offer an action plan for collecting a comprehensive list of risk areas and solutions for the digital deluge that is already upon us. We will outline mitigation, migration, archiving and repository strategies, and push for contributions from all participants.

Documenting the decision-steps in digital informatics - from photography, lab work, scanning, modeling, etc - are essential to building context, evaluating reliability and accuracy, as well as providing transparency and scientific replicability. Meta-documentation is rarely done to a sufficient level, for it is time consuming and the perceived, present value is minimal. The CIDOC-CRM, an ISO standard, now includes options for 'empirical provenance,' where the entire process history of any event can be recorded and evaluated. We will demonstrate the phenomenal value of this approach to digital documentation.

Web Accessibility Standards

The web has enormous potential to empower people with disabilities. However, authors and tool developers may inadvertently erect barriers in their designs that make it difficult or impossible for people with disabilities to use their web sites. The W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has developed standards for authors, user agent developers, and authoring tool developers to make clear what kinds of functionality are needed to ensure access to the web for everyone.