Seybold XML Day Highlights IDEAlliance Initiatives

Thursday, February 9, OASIS, GCA, and xml.com sponsored a special interest day during the Boston Seybold Seminars.  The day, titled "XML in Publishing," focused on the application of XML in the publishing environment.  

Laura Walker, executive director of OASIS, opened the day with a brief XML tutorial.  This provided an opportunity for those publishers who were not already familiar with XML to get up to speed.  

The morning session focused on the role of XML in commercial publishing.  During the morning session, two of the initiatives of GCA's new IDEAlliance were highlighted.  First, Jay Brodsky, Director of Technology, Tribune Media Services, discussed how XML can be used to facilitate the syndiction of content on the Web.  In particular, Mr. Brodsky focused on the Information and Content Exchange standard, ICE.  This XML-based protocol allows for the negotiation of syndication offers, and the ongoing syndication of content among trading partners.

Justin Scroggs, database manager at the research center for Time, Inc. provided information about the new IDEAlliance initiative known as Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata, or PRISM.  Like ICE, PRISM is an initiative of IDEAlliance.  PRISM focuses on the development of publishing industry standard XML metadata vocabularies to facilitate syndicating, aggregating, post-processing and multi-purposing magazine, news, catalog, book and mainstream journal content. Clearly PRISM and ICE can go hand in hand.  

Publishers want to create new revenue vehicles for their content.  Today, however,  repurposing consists mostly of cutting and pasting since there is no reliable way to automatically retrieve similar types of content and no agreement among publishers on how to describe content. Likewise there is no common language among software tools that create, store and manipulate these pieces of content.  The goal of PRISM is to address these problems by establishing a standard metadata vocabulary for publishers.

During his presentation, Mr. Scroggs reported on the progress of the PRISM initaitive and introduced Linda Burman, the chairperson on the group as well as other members of the PRISM Working Group that could attend.  Remarkably an interoperability demonstration showing how six different products can pass an intact PRISM metadata field was provided during the presentation.  

“What we’re showing you is a vision of a PRISM-enabled world,” explained PRISM founder Linda Burman, “We’ are demonstrating how metadata can be used effectively to solve business problems and contribute to the bottom line. If everyone uses the same vocabulary, processes can become predictable and therefore, automated. Once that happens, only exceptions will require the labor-intensive attention that almost every task requires today.”

The PRISM Working Group includes senior developers, standards leaders and strategists tasked with planning the future for major publishers. The current Working Group member companies are Adobe Systems, Artesia Technologies, Cahners Business Information, Conde Nast Publications, Getty Images, iCopyright.com, International Data Group (IDG/ITworld), KPMG, MarketSoft, Metacode Technologies, Quark Inc. sothebys.com, Kinecta Corporation, Time Inc, Vignette Corporation and Wavo. Members of the IPTC2000 NewsML Metadata SubCommittee are also working with the PRISM WG members.

'XML in Publishing" ended with a reception sponsored by IDEAlliance and PRISM at the Westin to encourage membership in PRISM and to introduce the new IDEAlliance staff to those attending Seybold Boston.