The Gilbane Group and Lighthouse Seminars announced that Udi Manber, a Google Vice President of Engineering, will kick-off the annual Gilbane San Francisco conference on June 18th at 8:30am with a discussion on Google’s search quality and continued innovation. Now in its fourth year, the conference has rapidly gained a reputation as a forum for bringing together vendor-neutral industry experts that share and debate the latest information technology experiences, research, trends and insights. The conference takes place June 18-20 at the Westin Market Hotel in San Francisco. Gilbane San Francisco helps attendees move beyond the mainstream content technologies they are familiar with, to enhanced “2.0” versions, which can open up new business opportunities, keep customers engaged, and improve internal communication and collaboration. The 2008 event will have its usual collection of information and content technology experts, including practitioners, technologists, business strategists, consultants, and the leading analysts from a variety of market and technology research firms. Topics to be covered in-depth at Gilbane San Francisco include– Web Content Management (WCM); Enterprise Search, Text Analytics, Semantic Technologies; Collaboration, Enterprise Wikis & Blogs; “Enterprise 2.0” Technologies & Social Media; Content Globalization & Localization; XML Content Strategies; Enterprise Content Management (ECM); Enterprise Rights Management (ERM); and Publishing Technology & Best Practices. Details on the Google keynote session as well as other keynotes and conference breakout sessions can be found at http://gilbanesf.com/conference-grid.html
Category: Content management & strategy (Page 150 of 468)
This category includes editorial and news blog posts related to content management and content strategy. For older, long form reports, papers, and research on these topics see our Resources page.
Content management is a broad topic that refers to the management of unstructured or semi-structured content as a standalone system or a component of another system. Varieties of content management systems (CMS) include: web content management (WCM), enterprise content management (ECM), component content management (CCM), and digital asset management (DAM) systems. Content management systems are also now widely marketed as Digital Experience Management (DEM or DXM, DXP), and Customer Experience Management (CEM or CXM) systems or platforms, and may include additional marketing technology functions.
Content strategy topics include information architecture, content and information models, content globalization, and localization.
For some historical perspective see:
https://gilbane.com/gilbane-report-vol-8-num-8-what-is-content-management/
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Arle Lommel, LISA OSCAR Standards Chair, to discuss the importance of Unicode’s Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) project, which collects and provides data such as date/time formats, numeric formatting, translated language and country names, and time zone information that is needed to support globalization.
LC: What is the CLDR?
AL: The Common Locale Data Repository is a volunteer-developed and maintained resource coordinated and administered by the Unicode Consortium that is available for free. Its goal is to gather basic linguistic information for various “locales,” essentially combinations of a language and a location, like French in Switzerland.
LC: What does the resource encompass?
AL: CLDR gathers things like lists of language and country names, date formats, time zone names, and so forth. This is critical knowledge to know when developing projects for the markets represented by specific locales. By drilling down past the language level to look at the market level, CLDR data is designed to be relevant for a specific area of the world. Think of the difference between U.S. and British English, for example. You would clearly have a problem if British spellings were used in a U.S. project or prices appeared like “£10.54” instead of “$10.54.” Problems like these are very common when product developers don’t think through what the implications of their design decisions will be.
LC: What other issues does CLDR address?
AL: Other problems addressed by CLDR include the numeric form of dates, where something like “04.05.06” could mean “April 5, 2006,” “May 4, 2006,” or even “May 6, 2004,” depending on where you live. Clearly you have to know what people expect.
LC: What is the advantage of using CLDR?
AL: It makes resources available to anyone, at no cost. Without something like the CLDR, one would need to investigate all of market issues, pay to translate things like country names into each language, and so forth. Activities such as this can add significantly to the cost of a project. The CLDR provides them for free and provides the critical advantage of consistency.
LC: Why should content creators care about the CLDR?
AL: At LISA we have heard time and again that not taking international issues into consideration from a project’s earliest phases doubles the cost of a project and makes it take twice as long. While many issues relate to decisions made by programmers, some of the issues do relate to the job of technical authors and other content creators. While it’s unlikely that a technical writer will need to use a CLDR list of language names in Finnish directly, for instance, the content creator might design an online form in which a user fills out what language he or she would like to be contacted in. If there is insufficient room to display the language name because it is longer in Finnish (a common problem when going from English to Finnish), the end user may have difficulty, something that could have been prevented by the content author if he or she had been given the resources to test the design early on. The CLDR makes the information available that allows authors to prevent basic problems that create issues for users around the world.
LC: How can professionals contribute to the CLDR?
AL: Right now the biggest need of the CLDR is for native (or very good) speakers of non-English languages to (1) supply missing data, and (2) verify that existing data points are correct. Because the CLDR is volunteer driven, people of all levels of competence and ability are able to contribute as much or as little as they want. Unicode welcomes this participation. The real need is for people to know about and use the CLDR. In my experience even the savviest of developers often don’t know about the CLDR and what it contains, so they spend time and money on recreating a resource that they could have for free.
LC: How is LISA supporting CLDR?
AL: We are committed to supporting Unicode and the CLDR, so we have launched an initiative where people who sign up with LISA to contribute to the CLDR and who spend ten or more hours working on the project are eligible to receive individual LISA membership for a year as a token of our appreciation for their contribution. So if any readers have the needed language/locale skills to supply data missing from the CLDR or to review existing data, they can contact me to get started.
White papers on W3C standards in practice and component content management in practice are now available in the Gilbane white paper library.
Using XML and Databases: W3C Standards in Practice serves as a handy reference guide to the current status of the major XML standards.
Component Content Management in Practice: Meeting the Demands of the Most Complex Content Applications provides an overview of the requirements for technology that manages content at a granular level. To quote the executive summary:
[The paper] compares the requirements of component content management with the capabilities of more general content management technologies, notably web content management and document management. It then looks at the technology behind CCMS in depth, and concludes with example applications where CCMS can have the most impact on an enterprise.
No registration is required to read or download the papers.
Canto announced the immediate availability of Cumulus 7.5.3, a minor update that improves the performance and reliability of the entire Cumulus product line. The company says that Cumulus 7.5.3 is running on the recently released Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista, and OS X Leopard performance and reliability continues to be stable since the release of version 7.5.2, though a handful of improvements have been made to support Apple’s latest OS even better. Canto recommends all customers upgrade to Cumulus 7.5.3, regardless of operating system, to benefit from global fixes and improvements. Customers on active service agreements can download the update free of charge from Canto’s Customer Portal. The Cumulus product line was last updated in December, 2007, with the release of Cumulus 7.5.2. http:/www.canto.com/
Ten years ago I had a belief that a meta-data approach to managing enterprise information was a valid way to go. The various structures, relationships and complexities of IT systems led to disjointed information. By relating the information elements to each other, rather than synchronizing the information together, we _might_ stand a chance.
At the same time a new set of standards was emerging, standards to describe, relate and query a new information model, based on meta-data, these became know as the Semantic Web, outlined in a Scientific American article (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21 ) in 2001.
Fast forward to 2008 – where are we with this vision. Some part of me is thrilled, another part disappointed. We have adoption of these standards and this approach at use in everyday information management situations. Major software companies and startup’s alike are implementing Semantic Technology in their offerings and products. However, I am disappointed that we still find it hard to communicate what this semantic technology means and how valuable it is. Most technologists I meet glaze over at the mention of the Semantic Web or any of it’s standards, yet when asked if they think RSS is significant, praise it’s contributions.
Over a series of posts to this blog, I would like to try and explain, share and show some of the value of Semantic Technology and why one should be looking at it.
Let’s start with what is Semantic Technology and what are the standards that define it’s openness. To quote Wikipedia “In software, semantic technology encodes meanings separately from data and content files, and separately from application code.” This abstraction is a core tenant and value provided by a Semantic approach to information management. The idea that our database or programming patterns do no restrict the form or boundaries of our information is a large shift from traditional IT solutions. The idea that our business logic should not be tied to the code that implements it, nor the information that it operates on is all provided through this semantic representation. So firstly ABSTRACTION is a key definition.
The benefit of this is that systems, machines, solutions, whatever term you wish to use can interact with each other – share, understand and reason, without having been explicitly programmed to understand each other.
With this you get to better manage CHANGE. Your content and systems can evole or change with the changes managed through the Semantic Technology layer.
So what makes up Semantic Technology, one sees the word in a number of soltuions or technologies, are they all created equal.
In my view, Semantic Technology can only truly claim to be so, if it is based on and implements the standards laid out through the (W3C) World Wide Web Consortium standards process. http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
The vision of the Semantic Web and the standards required to support it continue to expand, but the anchor standards have been laid out for a while.
RDF – The model and syntax for describing information. It is important to understand that with the RDF standards there are multiple things defined to create this standard – the model (or data model) , the syntax (how it is written/serialized) and the formal semantics (or logic described by the use of rdf). In 2004, the original RDF specification was revised and published as 6 separate documents, each covering an important area of the standard.
RDF-S – Provides a typing system for RDF and the basic constructs for expressing Ontologies and relationships within the meta data structure.
OWL – To quote the W3C paper, this facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF-S by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics.
SPARQL – While anyone with a Semantic Technology solution invented there own query language (why was this never there one in the first place!), SPARQL, pronounced “sparkle” is the w3c standardization of one. It is HUGE for Semantic Technology and makes all the effort with the other three standards worthwhile.
These standards are quite a pile to sift through, understanding the capabilities embodied in them takes significant effort, but it is the role of technologists in this arena to remove that need for you to understand them. It is our job to provide tools, solutions and capabilities that leverage the these standards bringing semantic technology to life and deliver the power defined within them.
But that is the subject of another post. So what does this all mean in real life? In my next post I will layout a concrete example using product information as an example.
Kentico Software and Applied Innovations a Microsoft Gold Certified provider of Windows-based Hosting solutions, announced the two companies have partnered to offer a free Web site solution for .NET User Groups. The solution, available through Kentico’s partnership with Applied Innovations, allows local .NET developer communities to collaborate between community members. Users will receive a free license of Kentico CMS Enterprise Edition (valued at $1,499) and a ready-to-use Web site template that helps .NET User Groups to share information with group members; inform members about group meetings; publish articles and presentations from the meetings; communicate in discussion forums; distribute e-mail newsletters; create blogs; share files and photos; and create member-only areas. The custom Web site template was created to meet the specific needs of .NET user groups. The template allows groups to focus on their community activities, rather than exhaust resources building a Web site. Applied Innovations will provide a free hosting account for .NET user groups to host their Kentico CMS installation. .NET User Groups can sign up for a free license and hosting at http://www.kentico.com/, http://www.appliedi.net
Interwoven, Inc, announced that it is now offering the recently acquired Optimost real-time multivariable testing and Website optimization capabilities to the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. The Interwoven Optimost Website optimization solution allows online marketers to get more from their existing customer acquisition and Website investments by maximizing online conversion rates. The solution identifies the most compelling combination of Web content and design by exposing different combinations of online content elements to different visitors and then measuring visitors’ actions. As part of this announcement, Interwoven also will be growing its network of Interwoven Optimost service specialists, and will be expanding its Interwoven Optimost certification process to APAC interactive marketing firms. http://www.interwoven.com/
Attention: technical writers! In the spotlight next week: the availability of authoring assistance technologies that bring a living, breathing corporate Style Guide into content creation environments. Creating team-authored product support content with consistency and globalization in mind has come a long way. More on that over on the Globalization blog.
Join me on April 9th to discuss the value of translation-oriented authoring with technology provider across Systems, language services provider Argo Translation, Inc., globalization consultant Richard Sikes, and QuadGraphics, a customer reaping the benefits of authoring assistance technology in a FrameMaker environment.
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