This week at the 22nd Annual DIA Conference for Electronic Document Management, selected vendors presented their views on how the SAIC DIA EDM reference model could be accommodated within their software products, and how they plan to leverage this model within their technologies. The vendors illustrated how a standard taxonomy for submissions related documents, or artifacts, could enable strong collaboration between business partners.

In the session, we talked about how a flexible Enterprise Content Management platform needs to provide a framework that allows industry standard metadata taxonomies to be inherently accommodated within the system. By leveraging a standard implementation methodology, the EDM reference model is readily employed in Life Sciences deployments in an open and sustainable manner. Using standard system configuration capabilities the EDM reference model provides a consistent taxonomy for the creation of document types, folders, categories and attributes within an ECM system.

We also talked about how flexible ECM systems are able to extend the DIA EDM reference model employment to include corporate taxonomy requirements, and to adapt to changes in the EDM reference model.

The reference model shows great promise for business partners who want to share content and metadata. The ability to export content with a standard set of tags will enable better and more rapid collaboration.