W3C and OASIS have published WebCGM 2.0, a new industry standard for technical illustrations in electronic documents. WebCGM, which is widely deployed in the defense, aviation, architecture, and transportation industries, has reached new levels of interoperability thanks to this joint effort between OASIS and W3C. Computer Graphics Metafile, or CGM, is an ISO standard for a tree-structured, binary graphics format that has been adopted especially by the technical industries (defense, aviation, transportation, etc) for technical illustration in electronic documents. As the Web emerged as the environment for sharing and creating documents, it became apparent that the best way to use CGM on the Web needed to be clarified, particularly for interactivity such as hyperlinks and hotspots. WebCGM 2.0 adds a DOM (API) specification for programmatic access to WebCGM objects, and a specification of an XML Companion File (XCF) architecture, for externalization of non-graphical metadata. WebCGM 2.0 also builds upon and extends the graphical and intelligent content of WebCGM 1.0. The design criteria for WebCGM aim at a balance between graphical expressive power on the one hand, and simplicity and implementability on the other. A small but powerful set of standardized metadata elements supports the functionalities of hyperlinking and document navigation, picture structuring and layering, and enabling search and query of WebCGM picture content. http://www.oasis-open.org, http://www.w3.org/
Category: Content technology news (Page 190 of 624)
Curated information technology news for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. News items are edited to remove hype, unhelpful jargon, iffy statements, and quotes, to create a short summary — mostly limited to 200 words — of the important facts with a link back to a useful source for more information. News items are published using the date of the original source here and in our weekly email newsletter.
We focus on product news, but also include selected company news such as mergers and acquisitions and meaningful partnerships. All news items are edited by one of our analysts under the NewsShark byline. See our Editorial Policy.
Note that we also publish news on X/Twitter. Follow us @gilbane
Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) – Google announced that the Google Mini now offers sophisticated search features for finding and sharing information within small businesses and departmental groups, including document and user-level security, as well as access to any business content through Google Onebox for Enterprise. Google’s access control capabilities integrate with existing security systems, helping to ensure that employees can access only information they are authorized to view. With Google OneBox for Enterprise, employees can search across a greater variety of corporate information stored in such business systems as Business Objects, Cognos, Cisco, Employease, Microsoft Exchange, Netsuite, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP, SAS, and others. Organizations can also create OneBox modules to access applications built in-house. Site administrators can now link the Google Mini search results page with Google Analytics to provide more detailed information about how people use search on their site. The new Google Mini also automatically generates sitemaps – allowing webmasters to expose more public content for crawling and indexing by Google.com. The Google Mini is offered in versions that search from 50,000 up to 300,000 documents, includes a year of support and is available for purchase online. http://mini.google.com
Information Builders announced the release of WebFOCUS Magnify, a search navigation tool that dynamically categorizes search results and supplements them with analysis and reporting capabilities. Magnify uses the metadata from Google or other search engines to index structured data records and provide access to all WebFOCUS capabilities through the search interface to provide improved relevancy of results. A feature of WebFOCUS Magnify is that it captures data on a message bus. Using integration technology from iWay Software, an Information Builders company, it adds metatags, and submits it to the search engine indexing mechanism. This avoids the need for crawling data stores, particularly database records, combining structured data in databases with unstructured search. WebFOCUS Magnify leverages the metatags and provides results in a navigation tree to guide users to the information they need. Features of WebFOCUS Magnify include: Dynamic categorization of search results – provides enhanced ways to narrow down your search; Search-driven parameterized reports; Dynamic directories – uses search to data mine; and is search engine agnostic – can work with Lucene and Google. http://www.informationbuilders.com
Fast Search & Transfer (OSEAX: FAST.OL) (FAST) unveiled the FAST Adaptive Information Warehouse (AIW), a new approach that lets users capitalize on their entire universe of information to make better informed decisions for competitive advantage. Built on a search platform, FAST AIW integrates an end-to-end framework of products that unifies search and Business Intelligence. FAST AIW puts the Business Intelligence solutions on top of the search platform to integrate and orchestrate all of the information needed to make BI more effective. Users can directly search and navigate Business Intelligence data in an ad-hoc manner, then display relevant, usable information to users without the need for predefined report creation. The FAST AIW platform includes FAST Radar, a Web-based Business Intelligence portal and tool that brings actionable information and statistical analysis to decision-makers throughout the organization by means of a familiar search and navigation interface. FAST Radar provides insights into data through personal, flexible dashboards that move intelligence in the enterprise from IT and business analysts to every business user. Also included is the FAST Data Cleansing Solution, which provides up-to-the-minute access to all information, structured and unstructured, regardless of its source or location. It uses linguistics to improve data quality, enabling organizations to match, merge, and cleanse data automatically. The FAST AIW platform, including FAST Data Cleansing and FAST Radar, is available immediately. FAST Data Cleansing and FAST Radar may also be purchased as individual products. http://www.fastsearch.com
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced that it intends to release the full Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). PDF has become a de facto global standard since Adobe published the complete PDF specification in 1993. Since 1995 Adobe has participated in various working groups that develop technical specifications for publication by ISO and worked within the ISO process to deliver specialized subsets of PDF as standards for specific industries and functions. Today, PDF for Archive (PDF/A) and PDF for Exchange (PDF/X) are ISO standards, and PDF for Engineering (PDF/E) and PDF for Universal Access (PDF/UA) are proposed standards. Additionally, PDF for Healthcare (PDF/H) is an AIIM proposed Best Practice Guide. AIIM serves as the administrator for PDF/A, PDF/E, PDF/UA and PDF/H. Adobe will release the full PDF 1.7 specification as defined in the PDF Reference Manual to AIIM for the purpose of submission to ISO. The joint committee formed under AIIM will identify issues to be addressed, as well as proposed solutions, and will develop a draft document that will then be presented to a Joint Working Group of ISO for development and approval as an International Standard. AIIM holds the secretariat for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee (TC) 171 and 171 SC2 for Document Management Applications, and is the administrator for the U.S. Technical Advisory Group to ISO TC 171 that represents the U.S. at international meetings. www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html
Dan Bricklin’s Software Garden announced the release of wikicalc 1.0. In Dan’s words: “After over a year and a half of work (part-time), I’m finally releasing the wikiCalc web authoring system as a “1.0” product. This means it has a pretty complete set of features for producing the quality output for which it was designed, has been relatively stable for a period of time, and has a reasonable amount of documentation. People who have held off testing or using the product until this point should now start taking a look. This is the code that will be the starting point for the SocialCalc project. You’ll find the new documentation, and a link to the downloads, on the new wikiCalc Product Home Page. This new documentation includes a “Features” page giving an overview of the product, a news page with an RSS feed, an “If you are new to wikiCalc…” page, and more. The documentation on the website is much more extensive than before. There are separate pages with details about setting up “Edit This Page”, “Live Viewing”, and other technical topics. The product Help files are reproduced, too. It is written from the point of view that many users will be setting up remote-access to hosted versions of wikiCalc. I designed it to be localizable into other languages, and reportedly Russian and Polish are far along, with more on the way including German, Italian, and Japanese. (I used Zbigniew Lukasiak’s rather complete Polish translation to test a lot of the localization code and catch bugs.) One person has written code for parsing and searching the edit log audit trail that wikiCalc keeps. As I fire up the Open Source project with the Socialtext people I’ll include places to post and keep track of these things.”
“There are companies in addition to Socialtext considering providing hosted services based upon wikiCalc. One that sprung up on its own is on the iWoorx website. iWoorx adapted the wikiCalc code to create a portal targeted at business users who use spreadsheets and email daily for exchanging simpler spreadsheets. They added more advanced user administration, cool graphing capabilities, and a “test drive” capability. They let users subscribe to some preconfigured collaborative spreadsheet pages designed for coordinating globally sourced consumer products. You can try their “test drives” without signing up. They are meant as an educational tool to introduce regular business people to the “wiki-ness” of wikiCalc in a portal environment. Seeing wikiCalc integrated with animated Flash graphs (in their “Live ChartLinx” test drive) is really cool and is just the type of thing I was hoping to see from others who took advantage of the open nature of wikiCalc. I’m not involved in the iWoorx project and it makes me feel great to see what others are doing all on their own with my creation. With all of the excitement around the experimentation with products and services lumped under the term “Web 2.0” it’s time for a web spreadsheet engine that is open to all around which to innovate. I chose Perl for the implementation because it is accessible to a wide range of programmers with a wide range of abilities and is easy to get running on almost any system. … There are many important features to be added and many people to bring into the project so that it can flourish. I intend to continue devoting a lot of time to this product. Here’s what will happen next: As I wrote back last June, Socialtext is going to integrate wikiCalc functionality into their wiki system and provide hosting and support to those that want it. They are also funding an open source project around the wikiCalc code so that I can move the product forward as part of a community. This wikiCalc 1.0 code will form the base release to start what Socialtext is calling the SocialCalc project. While the Software Garden release of wikiCalc is covered under the GPL 2.0 license, Software Garden is the author of the entire wikiCalc product and owner of the copyright. There have been no “contributions”. This will change with the SocialCalc codebase. That code will be developed much more in the open and will accept contributions from others (subject to my approval for now) who will hold the copyright to their contributions. My development work on new features will be going into SocialCalc, and Socialtext will be providing a lot of developer time, too, so that is where the future action will be. SocialCalc will be released under a Socialtext Public License that, being based on the Mozilla Public License 1.1, may be more appropriate for some companies who have issues with the GPL. (For users that want code covered under the GPL, this wikiCalc version 1.0 will always be available under that license.) There will be more news about SocialCalc at a later time.” http://danbricklin.com/log/2007_01_25.htm#wikicalc1_0
Sonic Foundry Inc. (NASDAQ:SOFO) has enabled advanced search capabilities for Mediasite.com, a searchable Website focused exclusively on offering expert information via rich media presentations with video, audio and graphics. The site enhancements combine phonetic search, optical character recognition, language processing and contextual analysis. Mediasite.com aggregates nearly 13,000 rich media presentations, including over 250,000 slides and almost 9,500 hours of analyzed audio on topics ranging from the treatment of contagious diseases and general health-related issues to robotics, business start-ups, sociology, ethics, financial advice, personal improvement and career advancement. Mediasite.com provides visitors with a directory of these publicly available presentations created by hundreds of experts around the globe. Optical character recognition allows for word and phrase spotting within slide content or visual aids. Advanced phonetic search algorithms coupled with language processing and contextual analysis provide the ability to locate specific spoken words or phrases within a rich media archive, based on algorithms developed by Sonic Foundry. Sonic Foundry customers can now take advantage of these advanced search features for their own Mediasite content through new hosted services offered through Sonic Foundry’s professional services group. http://www.mediasite.com/, http://www.sonicfoundry.com/
Ipedo announced major enhancements to the XQuery Views capabilities in Ipedo XIP. In conjunction with the W3C’s formal establishment of the XQuery standard, Ipedo now provides organizations with enhanced XML query processing and data virtualization in their EII platform. Ipedo’s XQuery Views – a data virtualization approach that allows data to be combined without the need to copy, stage and transform it – also enables queries across combinations of data from remote XML and relational sources. This feature increases access to data and content across organizations. Ipedo’s XQuery can be used in conjunction with the XML processing and XQuery now available in Oracle 10g, DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server. Ipedo XIP allows XQuery Views results to be cached natively in XML. The new XQuery engine implements query operators that stream data values, so that query evaluation is memory efficient. XQuery Views can now be invoked directly via a Web Services API. Ipedo XIP can automatically generate the WSDL file needed for a particular XQuery View. In addition to standard data sources, Ipedo’s XQuery extension framework now makes it possible for users to make custom data sources, such as in-house applications accessed using custom APIs. In addition to the above features, Ipedo has developed further enhancements to XQuery in Ipedo XIP’s Dual-Core Query Architecture, including access to stored procedures in relational databases with support for parameterization of the XQuery Views that access them, and extended query plan description that will allow deeper drilldown of the steps involved in XQuery execution. These enhancements are available immediately for Ipedo XIP version 4.2 on Windows 2000, Windows NT, Sun Solaris, Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux. Pricing is on a per-CPU basis. http://www.ipedo.com
Subscribe to the Gilbane Advisor
