Markup your E-Discovery

Bob Spurzem of Ferris Research notifies us about a recent publication around E-Discovery. In his blog entry he points to the Electronic Discovery Refeence Model ( EDRM) group that announced in December its XML standard for e-discovery of electronically stored information. EDRM tries to address the headache you have preparing for eDiscovery by the multitude of propriarty formats your information lives in. While a lot of EDRM vendors jumped on that, it will be seen if that format becomes a standard. I surly like the better standardization and thus accessibility of meta data. On the other hand the major document formats are ISO standardized as well. So an interesting question: should one transit the propriety DOC, XLS, PPT formats to EDRM, OOXML or ODF? Notably absent from standardization so far, short of MIME, are email formats (MSG, OND) where EDRM could play a vital role.
I toyed around with DXL and it seems transforming a Notes document into EDRM is actually rather easy. ERDM XML has quite some activities planned for 2009, so keep a watch on the project website