(27)In order to facilitate the way in which the information stored by national registers can be searched for and exchanged with other systems, Member States should ensure that after the relevant transposition period has expired, all documents and information provided to any authority or person or body mandated under national law to deal with any aspect of the online procedures, as part of the online procedures provided for in this Directive, can be stored by the registers in a machine-readable and searchable format or as structured data. That means that the file format should be structured in such a way that software applications can easily identify, recognise and extract specific data and their internal structure. The requirement to ensure that the format of documents and information is searchable should not encompass scanned signatures or other data which are not suitable for machine-readability. As this could require changes to the existing information systems of Member States, there should be a longer transposition period for this requirement.