Dark matter in documents

Documents and processes are just as important for compliance as matter and energy are for astrophysics. Scientists currently believe that only a sixth of all matter is visible – and today’s documents also contain a lot of dark matter. In compliance processes, it’s the invisible portion of documents that poses problems. The main cause of invisible information in compliance documents is the fact that electronic documents still imitate paper documents. The situation resembles that of the early days of printing, when Gutenberg and Co. wanted to make their fonts look as handwritten as possible rather than optimizing the recognizability of letters for readers. Click on the title for more information about dark matter in documents.

In future, electronic documents need to be able to (help) guide business processes, not just look nice for readers who’ve printed them out. Digitized documents with stamps and handwritten notes may look chic, but they can cause problems in the digital world, particularly when the stored text is completely missing or corrupted due to an optical character recognition (OCR) error. The reverse is also possible – documents can give away too much information. For example, deleted passages may still be present in the digital document. Even worse, the paper document may have been checked to ensure that confidential sections are not visible, but it may still be possible to extract these from the digital version.