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
Category: Content technology news (Page 590 of 640)
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
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
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
Adobe Systems also announced pre-release availability of two new technologies, Adobe PDF Merchant software and Web Buy, a feature within Acrobat Reader, to its partners for testing and product integration. The technologies will enable publishers, distributors, retailers and others to make electronic content available for distribution and sale over the Internet. The company expects Adobe PDF Merchant and Acrobat Reader software with Web Buy to speed the adoption of eBooks and the use of electronic documents among businesses and consumers. Adobe partners include a range of publishers, distributors, retailers, device manufacturers, technology and service providers, each of whom maintains a specialized and important link in the publishing and delivery chain. They will begin testing and implementing Adobe PDF Merchant technology to provide titles to be distributed and sold via the Internet. Among others, Adobe is working with: Barnes & Noble, Inc.; Everybook Inc.; Fatbrain.com; 1stBooks; Glassbook, Inc.; Iomega Corporation; Octavo Corporation; Pearson PLC; R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company; Salon.com; Seybold Publications; Simon & Schuster, Inc.; and Xerox Corporation. www.adobe.com
Vignette Corporation and Quark, Inc. announced the integration of QuarkXPress and Vignette StoryServer 4 software. The relationship between the companies promises to reduce the cost structures associated with using print content online. The announced integration will enable nearly instant deployment of QuarkXPress content on the web. At Seybold, Quark announced avenue.quark, a type of -XTensions software for QuarkXPress that will enable customers to easily tag their QuarkXPress content and extract that content in XML format. Simultaneously, Quark and Vignette announced that they have worked together to link avenue.quark with Vignette StoryServer, allowing organizations to post rich content directly into the StoryServer production workflow. Working together, the two companies’ products provide a much needed, industrial-strength print-to-Web publishing solution. www.quark.com, www.vignette.com
eBusiness Technologies also announced version 2.6 of MediaBank, its media asset management system. Shipping in October, the upgrade will feature integration with IBM
Enigma, Inc., announced the INSIGHT 5.0 product suite update. Enigma’s INSIGHT content publishing suite delivers unified and highly functional Web and CD-ROM publications from any combination of PDF, FrameMaker, word processing, SGML/XML, and graphic/image source data. INSIGHT automates the content assembly and e-publishing process, integrating content with a wide set of integrated navigation, view, and search tools. New features within INSIGHT 5.0 include an Enhanced Illustrated Parts Catalog (eIPC), FrameMaker plus PDF support, Web user interface enhancements and Web annotation capabilities. In addition, Enigma’s “Distributed Intranet” capabilities have been further automated for delivering e-publications to customer intranets and corporate portals. Incorporated within the INSIGHT 5.0 suite are packaged add-on modules and developers toolkits for integrating INSIGHT e-publications to ERP and DMS systems. www.enigma.com
Cascade Systems Inc. introduced two new products, Cascade Commerce Server and Cascade Profile Server, at the Seybold San Francisco Conference. The systems are components of Cascade
Subscribe to the Gilbane Advisor
