Re: Re: How long before services sending/receiving XMLmight ne

On 2021-11-13 01:20, Stephen D Green wrote:

Data sent to a government body usually has to be deleted after a certain period of time. It cannot be kept longer than is needed.…

Well, that depends on the data and on the government body, doesn't it? 

My government has a National Archives body which keeps a lot of data for decades, and tries to keep some data forever. (Which is not all that long, so far, because my country is pretty young. But we have aspirations.)

I imagine agencies like that observe earth and space might want to keep some of their observation data for centuries, because their successors may want to compare future observations to past observations.

While it is being kept, it could be kept in a system,…

"In a system", eh? But systems need some amount of attention and improvement, or they stop working after a while. The OS on which they run change. The hardware on which they run stops being made. And so on. There are few "systems" which keep running for decades. But data and content can persist for decades and centuries. If I'm writing a contract, and the contractor will generate content which will be important for decades, it seems I should carefully choose the data format, not just the "system".

so the original message might not be what is kept.…

If I am paying Very Much Money to Expensive Government Contractor to produce a manual for my Durable Infrastructure Project, why would I ask them to deliver that manual in anything but the format which I want to keep?