Manfred Krüger

No abstract was provided for this paper.

1. A session summary from the chair

A session summary from the chair

A warning in advance: This session will not present glamorous new concepts or software-tools. It primarily deals with the hard and difficult work going on behind the publicly visible scene.

We will try to find out the pre-requisites needed to establish and to run publishing applications successfully.

To start with we name those pre-requisites which are necessary but not at all sufficient:

• the formal concept, whether it will be SGML or its child XML,
• some sophisticated software to support all those activities necessary to deal with the content and to produce sellable products.

By analyzing existing publishing applications (there are thousands besides HTML being done in practice since more than fifteen years now) we will detect clear criteria for success:

• The application design is strictly oriented towards publishing objectives in the future - less to the habits in the past or conforming to the structure of given data.
• Experiences with given SGML/XML-applications resp. application versions - internal or, better, external ones - have been considered intelligently.
• The investment in constant and intensive work on the contents to be published is pre-dominant.
• The design of the organizational environment is not taken as given by the software tools used but itself is seen as a key issue to create high quality publications efficiently and economically.

The contributions in this session will come from different environments, from so called corporative publishers as well as from commercial publishers. As I found in many projects in very different industries we can learn a lot from experiences in publishing applications which may differ in many aspects. The problem may be, of course, that the interesting ideas and concepts are not obvious. It is necessary to take a close look at our own application(s) whose details and hidden constraints we know best and to look at them from a perspective of an application with very different contents and publishing objectives.

This session brings together experienced people from different industries and gives them opportunity to think and to talk about this one topic which is structured publishing.

This implies that one will not learn much from merely reading the conference proceedings. The major value for us will be achieved by following the presentations in the conference, intensively thinking about what is presented and to discuss ideas and concepts during the session.

Previous

Table of Contents