IHS Group announced it has formed IHS Enterprise Solutions Group, a division that provides information management solutions to customers worldwide. Companies that need help managing their information will be the target market for this IHS Group division. IHS Enterprise Solutions Group will manage and host product Web sites, conduct custom publishing, provide content integration, perform document management, and provide data conversion services to a wide variety of industries. In forming this division, IHS Group is leveraging the services of seven existing companies within the IHS umbrella. Together, the companies that make up IHS Enterprise Solutions Group employ over 350 people in 10 countries. The companies that make up the new group include: NexData Solutions (www.nexdata.com), IHS Information Integration (www.solutions.ihs.com), IHS Technologies (www.ihs.de), IHS Publishing Solutions (www.ihspsl.com), Technical Indexes Ltd. (www.techindex.co.uk), IHS Enterprise Solutions (www.ihs.com.au), IHS Nordic (www.ihsnordic.com). IHS Enterprise Solutions Group also includes the IHS Web Hosting facility in Englewood, Colo., and the IHS Conversion Centers in Mexico, Malaysia and India, which provide data conversion services and programmer training. www.solutions.ihs.com
Day: August 31, 1999
Interleaf, Inc. announced QuickSilver, a comprehensive XML-based workgroup publishing solution for complex documents. QuickSilver offers customers a bridge to the rapidly emerging XML standard by extending the power of the complete line of Interleaf’s high-end desktop publishing solutions known as Interleaf 5, Interleaf 6 and Interleaf 7. With QuickSilver, customers gain the ability to convert legacy documents to the open XML standard and to publish to multiple formats including Web, CD-ROM or hardcopy distribution. QuickSilver is available immediately and as part of the introduction to QuickSilver, Interleaf will be offering a special migration package to its existing Interleaf 7 customers this September. www.interleaf.com
The Digital Imaging Group (DIG), the digital imaging industry consortium, disclosed its plans to enable a variety of image workflows through its metadata initiative, DIG35. The goal of the Initiative is to simplify the process of collecting and managing information about an image and in the process enable a broad range of applications from image management to digital photo finishing. Such a standard will benefit the many different users of digital imaging, from personal imaging at the consumer level; commercial imaging for e-commerce of image-based content; and professional imaging for such industries as real estate, insurance, and scientific imaging. The DIG35 Initiative is supported by a broad cross-section of DIG members: Agfa, Canon Inc., Digital Intelligence Inc., Digitella Technology Inc., Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Co., Eastman Kodak Co., Microsoft Corp., NETIMAGE, PhotoChannel Networks Inc., Polaroid and Seattle FilmWorks Inc.. XML will be a key technology in the implementation of the standard. XML’s powerful data representation capabilities and its wide spread adoption in the Internet will allow flexibility. For example, take the problem of describing the location a picture was taken. Depending on the application domain, location in a consumer photograph could be a place name or a GPS coordinate. For medical images, location would represent a part of the body; for astronomical images, location would carry yet a different meaning. The DIG chose XML not only for its widely adopted use, but also for the opportunity to unify its work with a concurrent effort happening in the ISO MPEG Committee (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11), the MPEG-7 Group. The DIG35 Initiative recently formalized an official liaison with the MPEG Committee to collaborate with MPEG-7’s effort in the area of still image metadata standardization. Through this partnership, the DIG will help define the metadata for still images within multimedia contents in order to help multimedia producers, owners and users manage their contents. www.digitalimaging.org
