Ingeo Education Series
Digital Document Standards

The world runs on standards, conventional specifications or formats that are accepted within a particular industry. Some standards, like the English system of weights and measures, are de facto standards, established gradually by years of common use. Other standards, like the metric system, are painstakingly conceived, debated, and then codified by a standards-setting body such as ISO 1 (the International Organization for Standardization), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Standards enable products, processes, and technologies created by different entities to interact as if they were all designed by the same person. The essential goal of standards is interoperability. Whenever two or more products work together to accomplish a single goal, standards provide the critical common ground.

Standards and Ingeo's products

Like most complex software solutions, Ingeo's Electronic Recording System uses a combination of proprietary and standards-based technology. Though it constitutes a complete, self-contained business solution, the Electronic Recording System relies on many other products and systems to accomplish its goals.

The Ingeo Electronic Recording System is composed of two parts. The ePrepare component allows lenders and title companies to create, sign, notarize, and submit digital documents for recording, without ever printing a page or leaving the office. The eRecord system enables county recording offices to examine, endorse, index, image, and return electronically submitted documents. The process is a collaboration between public and private agencies, so standards implementation is critical to efficient operations.

Since much of the activity of the Electronic Recording System is centered on the transfer of information over the Internet, it is important to follow the various Internet and web standards. Ingeo engineers chose standards-based data formats—Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML)—to make data easy to move between computers and software programs. Because of the realities of transferring sensitive information over the public Internet, standards-based protections were implemented—asymmetric cryptography and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology—to guard data integrity. Standards-based electronic payments allow parties to handle document fees efficiently and safely. Finally, in order to ensure the legality of the documents submitted and recorded by the system, Ingeo called on the protections afforded by RSA encryption algorithms and Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs).

Why are standards important?

In a utopian world, every person, every product, and every technology would work together in complete peace and harmony. In the real world, various people must use various tools created by various vendors to accomplish various tasks.

If there were no standards, light bulbs from different manufacturers wouldn't fit other manufacturer's sockets. Cars would be much more expensive, and would require proprietary gasoline to run. Only dealers would have spare parts. Just about every product involves one standard or another, because no product exists in a vacuum.

In the world of manufacturing, standards tend to involve physical dimensions and properties. For example, when Bob loads a strip of MegaNailCo framing nails into his SuperPneumaticCorp nail gun and builds a house, this is possible because people from MegaNailCo and SuperPneumaticCorp got together and made some important decisions. They specified the length of the nails, the distance between them, the length of the strip, and the method for joining them. Because of the standard, a little piece of utopia is created in the cutthroat world of fastening hardware.

In the computer software world, standards tend to involve communication. Different computers, operating systems, and software programs all speak different languages, and require interpreters to allow them to talk to each other. Standards help programmers get information from point A to point B—or from format A to format B—ensuring that as little as possible is lost in the translation. Standards provide a bridge between the different technologies.

Internet standards

Though they are often used interchangeably, the Internet and the World Wide Web are different animals. The Internet is a global computer network that communicates using a networking standard called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). The World Wide Web (or, more simply, the web) is a subset of the Internet that contains a huge collection of linked media (text, images, audio, and video) which is accessed using web browsing software.

With millions of people involved in the creation and distribution of web information, standards are critical. The key to a web standard is a concept known as hypertext.

Hypertext basics

Strange as it may sound, the World Wide Web was predicted in 1945 by a scientist named Vannevar Bush. In his article "As We May Think," published in The Atlantic Monthly, Bush makes some important observations about information theory:

"The human mind ... operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain." 2

Bush conceived a system "whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another." This interconnectedness is the hallmark of hypertext. The term, coined in 1965 by digital visionary Ted Nelson, refers to "nonsequential writing—text that branches and allows choice by the reader." 3 Throughout the next 25 years, several models of branching text were pioneered at institutions like Brown University, Xerox Corporation, and Apple Computer.

These efforts bore fruit in 1989, at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, when Tim Berners-Lee proposed a new system "that could store random associations between arbitrary pieces of information." 4 Berners-Lee himself created the basics of what would become Hypertext Markup Language—and the World Wide Web was born.

Hypertext Markup Language

The original web was entirely made up of text. But it wasn't just words—it was words and tags, which are the codes that comprise Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

Text is the most basic type of computer file. A text file is just a long series of characters (letters, numbers and symbols). Though computers have little trouble "parsing" strings of characters—breaking them up into usable chunks—people need help dealing with large amounts of text. HTML provides visual cues to help people understand the information in a web page. Tags tell a browser how to display the content of the page, making it much more readable. For example, consider the following string of plain text:

A Limerick There was a young butcher named Burke, Who became quite annoyed by a clerk And her constant reminders: "Don't sit on meat grinders," Got a little behind in his work. --Author Unknown

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