And with the new emphasis on secure cross-governmental information sharing, Chizen said, electronic documents will provide the face of intensifying back-end agency communication and collaboration, whether with one another, with industry or with international organizations.
Sharing customer examples such as the Internal Revenue Service and Food and Drug Administration, Chizen ushered in a demonstration of the new Adobe Acrobat 6.0 series, announced this week.
He said this latest version's full adoption of the commonly used Extensible Markup Language has helped PDF, a file format Adobe developed to allow the exchange of documents across computer systems without changing their layout, to catch on in the increasingly XML-dependent federal sector.
"PDF allows them to take the XML data and reproduce it reliably," but in a format that's easier on the eyes, Chizen said.
He said PDF systems targeted toward government users must involve open standards, be pervasive, increase document security, integrate with existing IT infrastructure and, soon, layer atop wireless platforms as mobile hardware continues to evolve.
But PDF seems to have already found a federal audience. Chizen said the public can link to about 2 million documents from .gov sites and has downloaded 1.5 billion PDF tax forms from the IRS Web site. Chizen added that the National Archives and Records Administration said last week it would accept PDF/A, a proposed international standard that defines how PDF files must archive and preserve documents for the long term.
Quelle: Government Computer News
