What is PRISM?

The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) specification defines an XML metadata vocabulary for managing, aggregating, post-processing, multi-purposing and aggregating magazine, news, catalog, book, and mainstream journal content. PRISM recommends the use of certain existing standards, such as XML, RDF, the Dublin Core, and various ISO specifications for locations, languages, and date/time formats. In addition PRISM provides a framework for the interchange and preservation of content and metadata, a collection of elements to describe that content, and a set of controlled vocabularies listing the values for those elements.

Metadata is an exceedingly broad category of information covering everything from an article's country of origin to the fonts used in its layout. PRISM's scope is driven by the needs of publishers to receive, track, and deliver multi-part content. The focus is on additional uses for the content, so metadata concerning the content's appearance is outside PRISM's scope. PRISM focused on metadata for:

• General-purpose description of resources as a whole
• Specification of a resource’s relationships to other resources
• Definition of intellectual property rights and permissions
• Expressing inline metadata (that is, markup within the resource itself).

Today PRISM consists of two specifications. The PRISM Specification, itself, provides definition for the overall PRISM framework. A second specification, the PRISM Aggregator DTD is a new standard format for publishers to use for delivery of content to web sites and to aggregators and syndicators. It is an XML DTD that provides a simple, flexible model for transmitting content and PRISM metadata.