Standards Based Knowledge Environment

The PPDM (Public Petroleum Data Model) Association has an interesting article on Standards Based Knowledge Environments. This article was published in the journal "First Break" in January 2005 and offers sound insight into the need for open standards for the oil and gas industry.
From the article:
"...A knowledge-based environment differentiates information
that is important and useful as a working asset, such as
project data stores, from information that must survive and
remain accessible and usable for years or decades.
Understanding the work processes that create and use information
lets oil and gas companies plan their data stewardship
from cradle to grave. Storing important, long term asset
data in vendor neutral forms (such as XML files, tiff images
and PPDM Databases) helps ensure that key information is
not locked away when it’s needed...."

If you think about it, this move towards (open) standards is well understood in other data management arenas, the latest of which is spatial data management within GIS. So, in effect we could learn to avoid the mistakes made in other fields, such as adoption of competing, proprietary standards.
Then there are industries that decided to go all out and create and adopt standards that look awesome on paper and inPowerPointt, but are a pain to implement. So those standards just kinda die and people go back to doing things the "old way" .