Competing Publishers and
Software Vendors Unite to Demonstrate Content
Distribution Technology
Washington D.C. (GCA's XML
2000 Conference, December 6, 2000) - Commercial
publishers and software vendors today announced
the latest version of the specification for
PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry
Standard Metadata), an XML-based standard that
enhances commercial content and facilitates
its distribution and management.
Using the latest version of the
PRISM specification, PRISM Working Group members
showed XML 2000 attendees how standardized metadata
can transform publishing business strategy.
A revised version of the PRISM specification,
first released to the public in September 2000,
is now available on the PRISM web site at www.prismstandard.org.
"Standardized metadata provides
vendor neutrality. For instance, large publishers
using different Digital Asset Management (DAM)
and Content Management Systems can feel confident
that they can share content without losing mission-critical
metadata," said Linda Burman, vice president
of Standards and Evangelism, Kinecta Corporation.
In the demonstration, representatives from Time
Inc., Getty Images, Artesia Technologies, Interwoven,
Kinecta and Banta showed how the same content
from multiple sources can be repackaged and
moved through web and traditional print publishing
workflows with relative ease."
The underlying technology weaving
these heterogeneous workflows into a cohesive
process is PRISM, an emerging XML standard for
publishers. Comprised of a recommended framework
and a standard metadata vocabulary, PRISM specifies
information such as rights holders, creation
and publication dates, and the relationships
among content components. The result is value-enhanced
information, which can be easily personalized,
aggregated and syndicated.
PRISM leverages a number of existing
standards such as XML, RDF, the Dublin Core
and NewsML. It also adds additional elements
to handle publishing-specific business needs,
such as managing reuse rights and permissions
and describing the component parts of articles
and publications.
There is an ongoing demonstration
of the PRISM specification in action at the
IDEAlliance booth, #802, which shows competing
vendors using PRISM to easily exchange content.
Participating vendors and content providers
include Artesia Technologies, Banta Integrated
Media, Getty Images, Interwoven Inc., Kinecta
Corporation and Time Inc.
PRISM also improves business processes
across organizations, enabling publishers and
other companies to efficiently repurpose information,
improve the precision of querying and data mining,
automate globalization of information, improve
process control and automation, and facilitate
the management of rights and permissions.
PRISM Addresses Core Publishing
Requirements
PRISM 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. Metadata is information about data
that helps humans and software applications
intelligently retrieve and use content.
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, facilitating
categorization, extraction and personalization.
- Improve search precision for querying
and data mining, resulting in better data
for "what ifs," and new product development.
- Automate localization of information.
- Improve post processing for syndication,
aggregation and archiving.
- Facilitate management of rights and permissions.
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 leading software vendors.
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 supporting publishing business
needs, particularly intellectual property
rights and permissions including information
such as geographic restrictions, time, language,
market, format, alterations or restrictive
use such as communicating to someone who
purchases an informational graphic that
the graphic can only be used on a web site
in a specific country domain or for a certain
time period.
- Marking product names, company names,
quotes and other important information inside
of content itself.
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
PRISM member companies are Adobe Systems, Artesia
Technologies, Cahners Business Information,
Condé Nast Publications, Getty Images, iCopyright.com,
International Data Group (IDG/ITWorld), Interwoven,
Netscape, Quark Inc. sothebys.com, Kinecta Corporation,
Time Inc, Vignette Corporation and Wavo Corporation.
To join PRISM either as a Working
Group or a Network member, go to www.prismstandard.org
or visit the IDEAlliance booth at XML2000.
About IDEAlliance
IDEAlliance is a vendor-neutral organization
supporting the development of industry information
standards. The formation of IDEAlliance is the
latest step in Graphic Communications Association's
(GCA) more than 30-year history of fostering
the development of various structured information
standards. For more information on IDEAlliance
or PRISM, visit our booth (#802), our web site
at www.idealliance.org,
or contact IDEAlliance Public Information Officer,
Daryl G. Grecich at (703) 519-8190 or dgrecich@idealliance.org.
