RSuite CMS now offers a CS3 Connector for InCopy users. The integration with Adobe’s CS3 enables InCopy users the ability to browse and open XML or InCopy documents in RSuite directly from the Adobe application. The RSuite CS3 Connector allows users to manage their content as XML within RSuite and to create a transformation to and from their own XML content model to the native XML file format of InCopy. This will help publishers who want to manage their content as XML throughout its life-cycle but also want to use the Adobe tools in their editorial and production process. Users can also store and develop workflows around InCopy and InDesign documents in RSuite. http://www.rsuitecms.com
Month: October 2008 (Page 3 of 3)
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) SYMM Working Group has published the the Proposed Recommendation of “Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL 3.0),” pronounced “smile.” SMIL 3.0 allows authors to write interactive multimedia presentations. Using SMIL 3.0, an author may describe the temporal behavior of a multimedia presentation, associate hyperlinks with media objects and describe the layout of the presentation on a screen. SMIL 3.0 is a modular XML application: its components may be used in other XML formats. SMIL also defines mobile profiles that incorporate features useful within the industry. Comments are welcome through 6 November. http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/PR-SMIL3-20081006/
MadCap Software announced the launch of MadCap Capture 3.0. Capture is MadCap’s screen capture and graphics editing software, which is designed specifically to address the needs of documentation professionals. With version 3.0, Capture adds several enhancements to provide image integration, quality, and control, including: Image text single-sourcing – Capture 3.0 expands on the integration with MadCap Flare, MadCap’s authoring software, which enables single-sourcing of content across the two applications. Now authors can enter a text description (screen tip or alternative text) for an image in a centralized location, so every time the image appears in a Flare project, the text automatically appears with it; System clipboard integration – Authors can now automatically save and insert screen captures into any application with direct system clipboard integration. Optimized size configuration for print and online publishing – Capture 3.0 allows authors to establish separate height and width settings for print and online publishing; Delayed capture – Capture 3.0 provides a time delay feature that lets you automatically capture an image after a certain number of seconds. This makes it possible to take screenshots showing elements such as drop-down menus and tool tips; Image blurring and magnification – In addition to being able to blur images around shapes, authors can now blur the area within shapes; Enhanced XPS support – Capture 3.0 provides the ability to save and load images in Microsoft XPS, providing a crisp image that does not become pixilated when someone zooms in. http://www.madcapsoftware.com/
We’ve been especially focused on enterprise search this year. In addition to Lynda’s blog and our normal conference coverage, we have released two extensive reports, one authored by Lynda and one by Stephen Arnold, and Udi Manber VP Engineering, Search, Google, keynoted our San Francisco conference. We are continuing this focus at our upcoming Boston conference where Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research, will provide the opening keynote.
Prabhakar’s talk is titled “The Future of Search”. The reason I added “enterprise” to the title of the post, is that Prabhakar’s talk will be of special interest to enterprises because of its emphasis on complex data in databases and marked-up content repositories. Prabhakar’s background includes stints CTO at Verity and IBM so enterprise (or, if you prefer “behind-the-firewall”, or “intranet”) search requirements are not new to him.
Here is the description from the conference site:
Web content continues to grow, change, diversify, and fragment. Meanwhile, users are performing increasingly sophisticated and open-ended tasks online, connecting broadly to content and services across the Web. The simple search result page of blue text links needs to evolve to address these complex tasks, and this evolution includes a more formal understanding of user’s intent, and a deeper model of how particular pieces of Web content can help. Structured databases power a significant fraction of Web pages, and microformats and other forms of markup have been proposed as mechanisms to expose this structure. But uptake of these mechanisms remains limited, as content owners await the killer application for this technology. That application is search. If search engines can make deep use of structured information about content, provided through open standards, then search engines and site owners can together bring consumers a far richer experience. We are entering a period of massive change to enable search engines to handle more complex content. Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research, will address the future of search: how search engines are becoming more sophisticated, what the breakthrough point will be for semantics on the Web and what this means for developers and publishers.
Join us on December 3rd at 8:30am at the Boston Westin Copley. Register.
Vignette announced the worldwide availability of QuickSite, a new service offering that simplifies the Vignette Content Management implementation process and enables organizations to launch new Web sites faster. QuickSite delivers a consistent infrastructure, helping marketing departments to launch multiple microsites and branded sites without having to recreate Web pages from scratch. The service deployment includes content management processes, templates and business adoption workshops before the customer is asked to determine additional site requirements. QuickSite also includes support for multilingual Web sites, displays of content information through tag libraries and CSS templates to manage the look and feel of a site with limited help from IT. Site Cloning allows organizations to replicate a site within minutes rather than days by reusing the templates. http://www.vignette.com
EPiServer announced the introduction of multiple new features for its content management system, EPiServer CMS 5 R2, including solutions for mobility and the iPhone. EPiServer has worked with two partners, Mobiletech A/S and Mobizoft AB, to provide a mobile experience to the visitors of their site, including mobile rendering, video conversion and payments. iPhone support is available as open source templates enabling the system to be viewed from an iphone. Images can now be prepared directly in EPiServer CMS so that web editors no longer need to work on them in another application before moving onto the web page. New dynamic content features enable external data which appears in many places on the website, such as financial or legal text, to be updated throughout the site. Page Type Converter makes it easier to merge pages of different types, and change other page types. Five standard reports are now available— Non-published pages, published pages, modified pages, expiring/expired pages and an overview of simple addresses. External data such as an archive of articles at a media company can be integrated and displayed in a website using EPiServer CMS. The data will be appear as a native EPiServer CMS page. This enables structured data stored on another document management system to be converted to a webpage in EPiServer and viewed. EPiServer CMS now supports Oracle, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, as well as XP and Vista, Visual Studio 2008 and 2000 Express, and ASP Net 3.5 SP1 or later. http://www.EPiServer.com/
I am surprised how often various content organizing mechanisms on the Web are compared to the Dewey Decimal System. As a former librarian, I am disheartened to be reminded how often students were lectured on the Dewey Decimal system, apparently to the exclusion of learning about subject categorization schemes. They complemented each other but that seems to be a secret among all but librarians.
I’ll try to share a clearer view of the model and explain why new systems of organizing content in enterprise search are quite different than the decimal model.
Classification is a good generic term for defining physical organizing systems. Unique animals and plants are distinguished by a single classification in the biological naming system. So too are books in a library. There are two principal classification systems for arranging books on the shelf in Western libraries: Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress (LC). They each use coding (numeric for Dewey decimal and alpha-numeric for Library of Congress) to establish where a book belongs logically on a shelf, relative to other books in the collection, according to the book’s most prominent content topic. A book on nutrition for better health might be given a classification number for some aspect of nutrition or one for a health topic, but a human being has to make a judgment which topic the book is most “about” because the book can only live in one section of the collection. It is probably worth mentioning that the Dewey and LC systems are both hierarchical but with different priorities. (e.g. Dewey puts broad topics like Religion and Philosophy and Psychology at top levels and LC puts those two topics together while including more scientific and technical topics at the top of the list, like Agriculture and Military Science.)
So why classify books to reside in topic order? It requires a lot of labor to move the collections around to make space for new books. It is for the benefit of the users, to enable “browsing” through the collection, although it may be hard to accept that the term browsing was a staple of library science decades before the internet. Library leaders established eons ago the need for a system of physical organization to help readers peruse the book collection by topic, leading from the general to the specific.
You might ask what kind of help that was for finding the book on nutrition that was classified under “health science.” This is where another system, largely hidden from the public or often made annoyingly inaccessible, comes in. It is a system of categorization in which any content, book or otherwise, can be assigned an unlimited number of categories. Wondering through the stacks, one would never suspect this secret way of finding a nugget in a book about your favorite hobby if that book was classified to live elsewhere. The standard lists of terms for further describing books by multiple headings are called “subject headings” and you had to use a library catalog to find them. Unfortunately, they contain mysterious conventions called “sub-divisions,” designed to pre-coordinate any topic with other generic topics (e.g. Handbooks, etc. and United States). Today we would call these generic subdivision terms, facets. One reflects a kind of book and the other reveals a geographical scope covered by the book.
With the marvel of the Web page, hyperlinking, and “clicking through” hierarchical lists of topics we can click a mouse to narrow a search for handbooks on nutrition in the United States for better health beginning at any facet or topic and still come up with the book that meets all four criteria. We no longer have to be constrained by the Dewey model of browsing the physical location of our favorite topics, probably missing a lot of good stuff. But then we never did. The subject card catalog gave us a tool for finding more than we would by classification code alone. But even that was a lot more tedious than navigating easily through a hierarchy of subject headings, narrowing the results by facets on a browser tab and further narrowing the results by yet another topical term until we find just the right piece of content.
Taking the next leap we have natural language processing (NLP) that will answer the question, “Where do I find handbooks on nutrition in the United States for better health?” And that is the Holy Grail for search technology – and a long way from Mr. Dewey’s idea for browsing the collection.
