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Excitement surrounds the XML and PRISM tutorial held at Time Inc.
Excitement surrounds the XML and PRISM tutorial held at
Time Inc.
Last month, three members of Time Inc, Peter Meirs,
Director of Alternative Media Technologies, Chris Green, Systems Architect and
Justin Scroggs, Database Manager, hosted a half day tutorial focusing on basic
XML and on XML metadata ― both as technology and as a framework for
content management in magazine publishing. This event was geared towards
non-technical editorial staff but was also useful to technical staff who were
not familiar with XML or with some of the specific XML metadata standards such
as PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata).
More than 30 people from the various Time Inc magazine
titles and business units attended the tutorial given by Dr. Ron Daniel Jr.,
co-chair of the PRISM Working Group and Standards Architect at Interwoven, Inc.,
and Linda Burman, President of L. A. Burman Associates Inc and founder of the
PRISM Working Group. Peter Meirs kicked off the tutorial with a real-life
example that clearly demonstrated the business value of standardized XML
metadata. As one of the founding members of the PRISM Working Group, Peter has
been focusing on metadata for quite some time.
Ron and Linda combined light-hearted banter with their
examples to make basic XML concepts, which have been known to be a little dry,
more approachable. Using functional and business perspectives, they also
explained why XML and specific XML vocabularies such as PRISM provide real value
for many business and production practices critical to publishers.
“Our goal was to demystify XML and present PRISM as an
accessible and useful tool for content management within our company. Linda and
Ron met that goal handily by presenting these technologies with a mixture of
humor and clear and knowledgeable explanations” said Peter Meirs.
PRISM is very useful because it can be used across the
enterprise for both print and electronic properties. In a traditional
publication environment, search is restricted to a table of contents. With a
rich metadata infrastructure, search is tremendously enhanced.
The last part of the tutorial consisted of software
demonstrations, which showed how XML vocabularies such as PRISM can be used to
improve existing processes and facilitate new functions and revenue streams.
These demonstrations illustrated some of the advantages of a metadata framework
but were not exhaustive in regards to what metadata can accomplish.
First, Jeffrey Wolff of Publishing Connections Inc. showed
how their Internet Content Publishing Suite (iCPS™) transforms Time magazine
stories from QuarkXPress layouts into XML, allowing stories to be multi-purposed
for the web or any other destination. This tool provides an expeditious way of
creating XML content from a proprietary format.
Next, Ron Daniel demonstrated importing the XML documents
that iCPS had generated into Interwoven’s TeamSite Content Management System
He then used Interwoven’s MetaTagger product to automatically tag the stories
with subject codes and other descriptive metadata. This type of metadata enables
more accurate search and personalization. It also addresses other business needs
such making it possible to analyze a collection of stories for business trends.
To demonstrate this use, Ron showed Visual Net from Antarcti.ca, which used the
PRISM-formatted metadata to create subject-oriented maps of the collection of
Time stories. These maps greatly simplified the analysis process.
Sam Pai, CTO of the startup company, Zinio, then
demonstrated Zinio’s system for distributing and viewing e-magazines. When
this product is released it will be a method of reading magazines that
incorporates many of the metaphors of the print reading experience. With the
addition of a metadata infrastructure such as PRISM, readers will get
significantly more value by being able to use rich search criteria to search
through one publication or through a series of publications. Once content that
was originally designed for print is marked up with metadata, it is possible to
repurpose it as an electronic magazine while still maintaining the publisher's
branded reading experience.
Mike McGaughy of eBooks.com then demonstrated a flipbook
browsing technology, also for electronic books and magazines.
About PRISM
PRISM, (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard
Metadata) is a key industry initiative hosted by IDEAlliance and sponsored by a
group of companies who have an shared business interest in creating and using a
common metadata standard as a basic part of their content infrastructures. The
group consists of software developers and content suppliers and consumers who
are involved in content creation, consumption, management, aggregation and
distribution, whether commercially or within intranet and extranet frameworks.
The PRISM Working Group and the PRISM Network are open to all companies and
include companies such as Adobe Systems, Vignette, Time Inc, McGraw Hill, CMP,
Artesia Technologies, Getty Images, Interwoven, Kinecta, Netscape and Quark. For
the coming year, the PRISM Working Group will be focusing on pilot
implementations, which combine content from multiple content suppliers and
software from multiple vendors.
For more information about PRISM go to www.prismstandard.org
or contact Ron Daniel, rdaniel@interwoven.com
or Linda Burman, linda@laburman.com.
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