Standardizing content syndication with ICE

Adam Souzis

Kinecta Corporation

San Francisco

USA

adam@kinecta.com

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Abstract

This presentation will explain how the ICE protocol is impacting online syndication and enabling new business models for companies in virtually any industry. It will also provide examples of how successful companies are using applications based on ICE to syndicate content today.

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Contents

Introduction
Why a syndication standard is necessary
What is the ICE protocol?
ICE benefits and functionality
Case study: Reuters
1. How it works
Conclusion

Introduction

As more and more businesses of every kind move to the Internet, there is an ever-increasing need for online syndication, that is, the distribution of information and content to partners and customers. For example, just a few of the different uses and business functions encompassed by online syndication might include:

Publishers and creators of content can create new sources of revenue. and/or promotional opportunities by distributing content to websites.
Manufacturers can distribute parts information to resellers.
Large enterprises can keep documentation in sync across multiple sites.
Businesses of all kinds can automate business processes by exchanging documents such as purchase orders and receipts with their vendors and customers.
Portals and merchant websites can aggregate content from many content publishers and other websites.

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Why a syndication standard is necessary

Exchanging content may sound easy enough, but without a standard way to automate this process, sharing online information across a network of partners becomes an expensive, ad hoc event. Adding each new partner requires customized, manual, time-consuming procedures. With each new partner, the content provider must negotiate type of content, content format, validation, delivery options and frequency, notification, reporting and monitoring, and issues of proprietary technology.

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What is the ICE protocol?

In February 1998, the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) Authoring Group was formed under the auspices of GCA (now IdeaAlliance) to devise a protocol that would create a standard way for businesses to establish syndication relationships and distribute content online. ICE Authoring group members include Sun, Microsoft, Adobe, Tribune News, National Semiconductor, Vignette and Kinecta. Alongside the authoring group an advisory group was formed including over 80 software developers, technology suppliers, and publishers.

In November 1998, the ICE Authoring Group submitted version 1.0 of the ICE protocol to the W3C. The complete ICE specification can be found on the Consortium’s web site at http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-ice.html and at the authoring group’s web location at http://www.idealliance.org/ice.

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ICE benefits and functionality

The ICE protocol addresses two major parts of the syndication process: linking the content sender (the “syndicator”) and the content receiver (the “subscriber”) and delivering the content. In ICE terminology the former is called “subscription establishment” and the latter, “package delivery.”

ICE relied on certain design principles to help ensure that is was widely adaptable including:

ICE is transport neutral: it can work with any underlying transport protocol as long as it is reliable. ICE provides binding for HTTP and can easily interoperate with proxy servers and firewalls.
ICE is content neutral: it does not specify any format for delivered content. Instead, ICE creates an “envelope” for content, which can range from XML to binary data to links to URLs.
ICE is security neutral: it does not specify how security or authentication should be provided. Instead, ICE relies on the underlying transport protocol, such as SSL.
ICE is extensible: it can be extended in several ways. In version 1.1 of the protocol, for example, ICE syndicator and subscriber software components are able to negotiate which public or private extensions can be used between them. This powerful functionality preserves interoperability while allowing maximum extensibility.

ICE is a relatively simple protocol, but it provides a rich set of functionality to enable syndication including:

Subscription establishment

Subscribers can request catalogs listing the subscriptions offers available to them
Subscriptions are negotiated between the syndicator and subscriber. This allows the automatic negotiation of an open set of the subscriptions characteristics – from operational ones such as when and how content is to be delivered to establishing what content format and business terms are to be used

Delivery of subscription packages (content)

Incremental delivery of new or newly updated content.
Content can be grouped or removed
Content can be delivered by syndicator push and by subscriber pull
Syndicators can request confirmation of content receipt and processing
Meta-data about the content can be specified, such as IP status, copyright information, and usage rights including expiration dates and editorial privileges

Even though ICE is less than two years old, it has already improved the business of online content distribution significantly. Consider, for example, the case of Reuters, Ltd., one the world’s leading distributors of financial data and news.

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Case study: Reuters

In the past, Reuters delivered a large part of its content by satellite and then, beginning in the mid-1990’s, also started sending content over the Internet. Both methods left room for improvement. Satellite syndication could require costly client site equipment installations to receive satellite transmissions. And, given existing technologies, setting up Internet syndication relationships often meant long delays as subscribers wrangled over customized delivery options, content formats, and other features.

To help eliminate the expense and inefficiencies of earlier syndication methods and to focus more attention on the Internet as a distribution medium, Reuters early this year introduced its new IDS. Reuters built IDS around the Kinecta Interact platform specifically to leverage the benefits of the ICE protocol. As a result, IDS customers no longer have to install additional equipment nor do they need custom features. In the process, Reuters also adopted XML as its content standard to give subscribers maximum flexibility to transform content and control its display.

How it works

As part of IPTC, the news industry standards organization, Reuters helped develop NewsML, a XML vocabulary for news feeds. IDS first converts Reuters’ internal news formats to NewsML. Then, using a text search engine and Kinecta’s Interact solution, IDS maps each story to the appropriate ICE subscription offers based on the type of content in the story. Reuters sells its customers subscriptions to these different offers and uses Kinecta Interact to set up the subscriptions for each customer. To receive content, customers install the Kinecta Interact Subscriber, a freely distributable ICE-compliant subscriber product. As news feeds flow into IDS and are mapped to subscription offers, subscribers connect to Reuters to retrieve the latest updates to their subscriptions. Once the content is received, subscribers can convert it to HTML using either the XSL templates provided by Reuters or by developing their own custom transforms using the various transformation and filtering options provided by the Kinecta Interact Subscriber.

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Conclusion

The explosion of business-to-business e-commerce we are witnessing today is made possible by standards like HTTP and XML. These two standards enabled the creation of a new infrastructure on top of the Internet’s existing framework. Now ICE builds on those standards, to achieve a new protocol for the creation of automated distribution networks, a necessary and key component of the emerging business-to-business e-commerce environment. And in the process, ICE enables whole new sets of business opportunities.

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