Ensuring Interoperability in eDiscovery Process

Digital forensics is a very important area that carries special sensibility in analyzing and studying digital evidence not only in cyber crime cases, but also in house or localized digital crimes. eDiscovery makes it necessary to identify the evidence which is in the form of metadata. To discover and analyze the metadata in a proper manner for a litigation process in different environments, interoperability is one of the central problems. In order to attain interoperability, there is a standard termed as EDRM XML v1.1. However, this standard needs further modifications and enhancements to ensure real interoperability in an arbitrary eDiscovery process. A novel XML schema is proposed along with the necessary changes from the current EDRM XML v1.1. The assessment and the evaluation of the system demonstrated that XSD can ensure interoperability in eDiscovery process indeed.