XML Standard Simplifies
e-commerce for Publishing Industry
PRISM Working Group releases
first public specification
SAN FRANCISCO (Seybold Conference,
August 29, 2000) - Publishers and other
content providers who want a common means of
exchanging, syndicating and re-purposing digital
content now have an industry standard vocabulary.
The International Digital Enterprise Alliance
(IDEAlliance) today announced that it has released
the first publicly available version of the
PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry
Standard Metadata) standard. The Beta specification
is available at www.PRISMStandard.org.
There are also copies of the specification available
at the IDEAlliance booth in the XML Pavilion
at Seybold Seminars 2000 in San Francisco.
The culmination of more than a
year's work by leading publishers and publishing
software vendors, the PRISM specification delivers
an extensible industry standard vocabulary for
syndicating, aggregating, post-processing and
multi-purposing magazine, news, catalog, book
and mainstream journal content. This will greatly
expand the market for licensed content.
PRISM Addresses Core Publishing
Requirements: The PRISM specification defines
an XML metadata vocabulary. It provides a framework
for the exchange and preservation of content
and metadata, and also provides a set of controlled
vocabularies used to describe the content being
exchanged. The specification focuses on four
kinds of metadata:
- Metadata to describe resources as a whole.
For instance, being able to describe a package
of photographs, stories, captions and information
graphics as an "article"
- Metadata about a resource's relationships
to other resources. For instance, being
able to indicate that a caption belongs
to a specific photograph or that certain
articles were once published together as
a Special Section.
- Metadata to support specific purposes,
particularly intellectual property rights
and permissions including information such
as geographic restrictions, time, language,
market, format, alterations or restrictive
use. For instance being able to communicate
to someone that an informational graphic
can only be used on a web site in a specific
country domain or for a certain time period.
- Inline metadata (that is, markup within
the resource itself) such as product name,
company name, etc. *
Metadata makes content more valuable
because it helps humans and software applications
to retrieve and use specific content components
in a particular way. Tools that support the
PRISM vocabulary will have a tremendous impact
on many business processes, making it possible
for publishers and other content providers to:
- Repurpose information efficiently, standardizing
searches, categorization, extraction and
personalization
- Improve post processing for syndication,
aggregation and archiving improve search
precision for querying and data mining,
resulting in better data for "what ifs,"
and new product development
- Facilitate management of rights and permissions
Similar to the ICE protocol, PRISM
is designed to be straightforward to use over
the Internet, to support a wide variety of applications,
to conform to a defined XML syntax and to be
practical and implementable by the leading software
vendors.
"In order to more fully automate
their business processes, content providers
have needed a common language to specify and
describe data. PRISM is that vocabulary. Used
with complementary standards such as ICE (Information
Content & Exchange) PRISM provides a solid foundation
for more efficient publishing processes," Linda
Burman, founder and co-chair of the PRISM Working
Group and Vice President of Standards and Evangelism
at Kinecta Corporation, explained. "Release
of the PRISM specification is a breakthrough
for enabling seamless online information exchange.
"Its simple. The PRISM specification
helps us to help our customers and their partners."
comments Ron Daniel, a Senior Information Scientist
at Metacode and co-chair of the PRISM effort.
"PRISM defines a standard XML output format,
letting our content enhancement software seamlessly
team up with other software in the distribution
chain to meet the needs of publishers for repurposing
their content."
About PRISM
The publishing landscape is rapidly
changing. Recent technological innovations have
led to a proliferation of display devices and
formats - print media, hand-helds, mobile devices,
desktop displays, screens and kiosks. While
offering content providers exciting new opportunities
for revenue sources and growth, such innovations
also present challenges. A content provider
must capture, manipulate, combine, protect,
manage, personalize, re-express and syndicate
content for multiple media without invoking
labor-intensive processes. And, they must deliver
that content in a manner consumers expect -
high aesthetic quality and logical context that
transcends media boundaries.
Because there is no reliable way
for publishers to automatically retrieve similar
types of content components, today, lack of
agreement on descriptions of content types also
affects rapid aggregation and syndication. Publishers,
aggregators and syndicators require knowledge
of rights and permissions not only of entire
documents, but also of each content component
within a document. Today, management of rights
and permissions and all the related details
- geographic restrictions, time, language, market,
format, alterations or restrictive use can be
a very haphazard, time consuming, and expensive
manual process. The PRISM standard provides
reliability, consistency and some automation
to this labor-intensive process.
The PRISM Working Group and
the PRISM Network: The PRISM Working Group
includes senior developers, standards leaders
and strategists tasked with planning the future.
The current Working Group member companies are
Adobe Systems, Artesia Technologies, Cahners
Business Information, Condé Nast Publications,
Getty Images, iCopyright.com, International
Data Group (IDG/ITWorld), MarketSoft, Metacode
Technologies, Quark Inc. sothebys.com, Kinecta
Corporation, Time Inc, Vignette Corporation
and Wavo Corporation. Members of the IPTC from
Reuters and Business Wire are also working with
the PRISM WG members. To join PRISM either as
a Working Group or a Network member, go to www.idealliance.org/PRISM,
visit the IDEAlliance booth at Seybold or contact
IDEAlliance at 703 519-8190.
IDEAlliance is a vendor-neutral
organization supporting the development of industry
information standards. The formation of IDEAlliance
is the latest step in GCA's more than 30-year
history of fostering the development of various
structured information standards. For more information
on IDEAlliance or PRISM, visit their web site
at www.idealliance.org, or contact IDEAlliance
Public Information Officer Pete Janhunen at
703/519-8190 or pjanhunen@idealliance.org.
* The PRISM specification refers
to other XML standards including the Dublin
Core Subset, NITF (News Industry Text Format)
and NewsML V1.0Beta
