Doubts cast over saving websites for posterity

Date: 25/04/02

By Peter Chapman

FUTURE generations of European historians will be totally baffled by the myriad of jumbled information currently stored on EU and government web pages, an industry expert has warned.

Fred Perkins, chief operating officer for The Stationery Office - a body that manages UK government information - said there were better digital archives of Victorian-era documents than the millions of pages of unordered data currently spewed onto websites by bodies such as the European Commission.

The warning comes as information society Commissioner Erkki Liikanen steps up the effort to boost 'electronic government' in the EU.

'In 20 or 30 years' time how are we going to know what the European Commission, for example, said today? Our successors are going to be wondering what we were thinking about - because no one has got their act together,' said Perkins, adding that archived versions of newspapers such as European Voice would probably be more useful.

He said it was uncertain how information published on official websites today could be found in years to come - and how its validity could be verified.

A key problem, said Perkins, was the lack of reliable cross-references between information on a web page and information on that information - known in the jargon as 'metadata'.

He said the mess could be avoided if governments and EU institutions agreed common systems for handling and presenting information, and reengineered the way they use it.