IDEAlliance Issues ICE 2.0 RFC at Industry News Standards Summit

Industry Strength, Web-Services Compliant Syndication Protocol Nears Final Approval

Philadelphia, PA – Dec. 9, 2003 – IDEAlliance, a leading trade association dedicated to fostering information technology standards, highlighted the new ICE 2.0 Specification and issued a Request for Comment at the News Standards Summit held in conjunction with the XML 2003 Conference and Exposition. XML 2003 is being held Dec. 7-12 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

The News Standards Summit, co-sponsored by IDEAlliance, IFRA ( INCA-FIEJ Research Association) , IPTC ( International Press Telecommunications Council) , NAA (Newspaper Association of America), and OASIS, brought together 75 major players in the news industry – experts on news metadata standards, as well as commercial news providers and aggregators, to analyze the current state of (and future expectations for) XML-enabled news publishing efforts from both the content and processing-model perspectives.

The ICE specification, originally developed in 1998 by a community of 80 content providers and software venders, provides businesses with an XML-based common language and architecture that facilitates automatic delivery, updating and managing content assets in a trusted fashion without manual packaging or knowledge of remote Web-site structures. With the development of this major revision to the ICE Specification, robust content syndication is supported in a Web Services environment for the first time.

According to Dr. Richard Martin, Chairman of the ICE2 Specification Development Committee, "For Version 2.0 of the ICE protocol, it was critical to consider integration of Web Services related standards for the ICE2 definition. Given that ICE content syndication and the Web Services standards are squarely focused on distributed computing space, the synergy between the two sets of standards should be exploited to make ICE2 more complete and easier to adopt.”

Dianne Kennedy, Vice President of Publishing Technologies for IDEAlliance and Editor of the ICE 2.0 Specification, commented, “Unlike RSS and other light-weight syndication protocols, ICE 2.0 is designed to support industrial-strength content syndication. It provides for subscription management, verification of delivery, and scheduled delivery in both push and pull modes. ICE is the protocol for syndicators who are distributing ‘valued content' that generates a revenue stream or requires guaranteed delivery in a secure environment.”

Development of the ICE2 specification is an open industry activity, and user participation is welcomed. The ICE Authoring Group is now seeking comments from organizations that have interest in putting the proposed ICE2 specification to use. The specification and all accompanying schemas and WSDL scripts are available at http://www.icestandard.org . The ICE Authoring Group will be conducting two Web conference walkthroughs of the technical specification January 15 and January 22, 2004. To learn more about participation in the ICE development activity, e-mail Laird Popkin, Chairman of the ICE Authoring Group, at laird@wmg.com or Dr. Richard Martin, Vice Chairman of the ICE-AG and Chairman of the ICE2 development effort, at rmartin@activedatax.com .

About ICE and the ICE Authoring Group

ICE (Information and Content Exchange) is a key industry initiative hosted by IDEAlliance and sponsored by a group of companies who have a common interest in solving the problem of automating and managing the delivery of every type of content. The group consists of software developers and companies who distribute or consume content, whether commercially or within intranet and extranet frameworks. The ICE Authoring Group is open to all companies and includes companies such as Adobe Systems, Active Data Exchange, Oracle, Tribune Media Services and Warner Music Group. Learn more about ICE at www.icestandard.org .

About IDEAlliance
IDEAlliance (International Digital Enterprise Alliance) is a not-for-profit membership organization. Its mission is to advance user-driven, cross-industry solutions for all publishing and content-related processes by developing standards, fostering business alliances, and identifying best practices. Founded in 1966 as the Graphic Communications Association, IDEAlliance has been a leader in information technology, developing Document Markup Metalanguage (GENCODE), sponsoring the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and fostering eXtensible Markup Language (XML). IDEAlliance builds on these languages to create specifications that enhance efficiency and speed information in all aspects of publishing and content-related processes. Learn more about IDEAlliance at www.idealliance.org.

About XML 2003
XML 2003 programs focus on critical XML topics such as B2B, content management, graphics and multimedia, publishing, vertical industry applications, Web services, and more.

For more information, visit http://www.xmlconference.org/xmlusa/2003/

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Contact

Dianne Kennedy
IDEAlliance
630.941.8197
dkennedy@idealliance.org