Curated for content, computing, data, information, and digital experience professionals

Category: Web technologies & information standards (Page 18 of 58)

Here we include topics related to information exchange standards, markup languages, supporting technologies, and industry applications.

What is Smart Content?

At Gilbane we talk of “Smart Content,” “Structured Content,” and “Unstructured Content.” We will be discussing these ideas in a seminar entitled “Managing Smart Content” at the Gilbane Conference next week in Boston. Below I share some ideas about these types of content and what they enable and require in terms of processes and systems.

When you add meaning to content you make it “smart” enough for computers to do some interesting things. Organizing, searching, processing, and discovery are greatly improved, which also increases the value of the data. Structured content allows some, but fewer, processes to be automated or simplified, and unstructured content enables very little to be streamlined and requires the most ongoing human intervention.

Most content is not very smart. In fact, most content is unstructured and usually more difficult to process automatically. Think flat text files, HTML without all the end tags, etc. Unstructured content is more difficult for computers to interpret and understand than structured content due to incompleteness and ambiguity inherent in the content. Unstructured content usually requires humans to decipher the structure and the meaning, or even to apply formatting for display rendering.

The next level up toward smart content is structured content. This includes wellformed XML documents, content compliant to a schema, or even RDMS databases. Some of the intelligence is included in the content, such as boundaries of element (or field) being clearly demarcated, and element names that mean something to users and systems that consume the information. Automatic processing of structured content includes reorganizing, breaking into components, rendering for print or display, and other processes streamlined by the structured content data models in use.

Smart Content diagram

Finally, smart content is structured content that also includes the semantic meaning of the information. The semantics can be in a variety of forms such as RDFa attributes applied to structured elements, or even semantically names elements. However it is done, the meaning is available to both humans and computers to process.

Smart content enables highly reusable content components and powerful automated dynamic document assembly. Searching can be enhanced with the inclusion of metadata and buried semantics in the content providing more clues as to what the data is about, where it came from, and how it is related to other content. Smart content enables very robust, valuable content ecosystems.

Deciding which level of rigor is needed for a specific set of content requires understanding the business drivers intended to be met. The more structure and intelligence you add to content, the more complicated and expensive the system development and content creation and management processes may become. More intelligence requires more investment, but may be justified through benefits achieved.

I think it is useful if the XML and content management (CMS) communities use consistent terms when talking about the rigor of their data models and the benefits they hope to achieve with them. Hopefully, these three terms, smart content, structured content, and unstructured content ring true and can be used productively to differentiate content and application types.

Alfresco Releases OASIS CMIS 1.0 Public Review Implementation

Alfresco Software announced that it has included the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Version 1.0 in Alfresco Community 3.2 to enable developers and organizations to participate in the public review process. The OASIS CMIS Technical Committee (TC) has recently approved CMIS Version 1.0 as a Committee Draft and announced the start of a two month public review period. The objective of the CMIS specification is to deliver a common REST or Web Services API that can be used to develop write-once, run-anywhere, next generation content and social applications. The CMIS specification is backed by vendors including Alfresco, Adobe Systems, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle and SAP. As an OASIS TC member, Alfresco is able to offer an implementation of CMIS for developers who wish to participate in the public review process. The public review ends December 22, 2009. The OASIS TC has issued an open invitation to comment and strongly encourage feedback from potential users and developers. CMIS 1.0 Public Review can be downloaded with Alfresco Community 3.2 at: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_Community_Edition.

Nuts and Bolts Tutorials at The Gilbane Conference

In a world that seems increasingly about technology itself, it has become tempting to assume that the questions and challenges of new and better information products is about the technology.  While it is true that technology is the key enabler of the new information world we are building, it is also true that the decision making and judgment involved in how that technology is to be organized and deployed is of equal–and not decreasing–importance.  Indeed, as the products move toward increasing sophistication and flexibility–smart content you might say–the importance of the human and organizational parts of the information life cycle become even more important. 

It is a truism that you cannot deliver information products you can’t create and manage, and with the circle of participants in that creation and management ever widening, we must be sensitive to the limits of the creators.  Moreover, while just "getting it up on the web" used to be at least sufficient to justify deployment of information products, today’s information consumer has a much more extensive and demanding list of features required before he will accept web-based information.  The publisher who forgets  or ignores that list is for trouble.

In a half-day session preceding the Gilbane conference next week, the Gilbance consulting team will tackle some of the real world challenges inherent in this rapidly changing information world, providing both sign posts for issues likely to come up and "in the trenches" suggestions for how to deal with them.  The goal of the session, scheduled for the afternoon of December 1, is that the attendees leave with a better handle on how to proceed in the quest for better information products and the role "smart content" should play. 

The presenters, in addition to their expertise in the technology and tools of information, bring a unique resource to their efforts: years of design, implementation and evaluation of real organizations facing real challenges.

Upcoming Workshop: Managing Smart Content: How to Deploy XML Technologies across Your Organization

As part of next week’s Gilbane Boston Conference, the XML practice will be delivering a pre-conference workshop, “Managing Smart Content: How to Deploy XML Technologies across Your Organization.” The instructors will be Geoff Bock, Dale Waldt, Bill Trippe, Barry Schaeffer and Neal Hannon–a group of experts that represents decades of technical and management experience on XML initiatives.

A tip of the virtual hat to Senior Analyst Geoff Bock for organizing this.

Smart content holds great promise. First with SGML and now with XML, we are marking up content with both formatting and semantic tags, and adding intelligence to electronic information. Using richly tagged XML documents that exploit predefined taxonomies, we are developing innovative applications for single source publishing, pharmaceutical labeling, and financial reporting. By managing content snippets in a granular yet coherent fashion, these applications are revolutionizing our capabilities to meet business needs and customers’ expectations.

What’s working and why? What are the lessons learned from these innovative applications? Does the rapid growth of web-based collaborative environments, together with the wide array of smart content editors, provide the keys to developing other business solutions? There are many promising approaches to tagging content while doing work. Yet we still face an uphill battle to smarten up our content and develop useful applications.

In this workshop, we the five members of the Gilbane practice on XML technologies will share our experiences and provide you with practical strategies for the future. We will address a range of topics, including:

  • The business drivers for smart content
  • Some innovative content management techniques that make authors and editors more productive
  • The migration paths from ‘conventional’ documents to smart content
  • How to apply industry-specific taxonomies to tag content for meaning
  • The prospects for mash-ups to integrate content from disparate application communities

We will discuss both the rapidly developing technologies available for creating, capturing, organizing, storing, and distributing smart content, as well as the organizational environment required to manage content as business processes. We will identify some of the IT challenges associated with managing information as smart content rather than as structured data, and map strategies to address them. We invite you to join the conversation about how best to exploit the power of XML as the foundation for managing smart content across your organization.

SDL XySoft Releases Significant New Version of SDL Contenta S1000D Software

SDL XySoft announced a new release of its SDL Contenta CSDB software designed to support the latest version of the S1000D specification, Issue 4.0. This new release manages multiple versions of the specification in one CSDB. This capability is meant to help eliminate the costly step of converting legacy S1000D data modules and is a tool for aerospace or defense programs that are required to maintain multiple versions of the specification at the same time. SDL Contenta S1000D is integrated with SDL’s publishing technology, which supports the generation and delivery of both Type 1 and Type 2 IETPs. The SDL Contenta S1000D 4.0 solution package comes complete with sample publication formatting styles and IETP skins. The new release of SDL Contenta S1000D also provides support for the new SCORM content package and Learning Data modules. SDL Contenta 4.0 also takes advantage of the new S1000D 4.0 data model/schema that makes it easier to author content, provides more intuitive XML tags, and adds more consistency and coherence to the specification. This added level of flexibility makes the S1000D specification an option to businesses outside of aerospace and defense, particularly in markets such as manufacturing, transportation and heavy machinery. http://www.sdlxysoft.com

IXIASOFT Announces Partnership with XML-INTL

IXIASOFT has announced a strategic technology partnership with XML-INTL. By integrating the IXIASOFT DITA CMS with the XML-INTL XTM Suite, IXIASOFT customers should benefit from a fully integrated translation management suite which should further enhance their control over the localization process. The DITA CMS is a content management system aimed at technical communicators for the authoring, management and publishing of DITA-based technical documentation. XML-INTL is the developer of the XMT Suite, set of tools for translation. The integration between the two offerings allow users to move their content from the CMS to the translation management tools and have access to updated localized content. http://www.ixiasoft.com/

Astoria Software and Translations.com Announce Translation-Enabled Content Management Initiative

Astoria Software and Translations.com have aligned in order to create a single solution for managing and localizing XML content. This joint development initiative, Translation-Enabled Content Management, represents the service-level integration of Astoria On-Demand and Translations.com’s GlobalLink Localization Suite. Translation-Enabled Content Management will provide global organizations with a way to bring product information to market simultaneously in any locale and language. Key components of the Translation-Enabled Content Management initiative include: seamless integration of GlobalLink Project Director functionality embedded in the Astoria On-Demand user-interface; allows Astoria On-Demand users to work directly with Translations.com’s ISO-certified linguistic team or use other internal/external translation resources; centralized project tracking, business process automation and reporting for all localization projects across all vendors; server-based translation memory integration capabilities via GlobalLink Server; Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption of all data travelling to and from the end-user’s desktop, as well as data travelling between Astoria On-Demand and GlobalLink; a Service Oriented Architecture that IT can integrate into their SOA Governance and Deployment policy frameworks; unified solution for the creation, management, localization and production of XML-based documentation; and, data and Service hosting in Tier 1 data centers that comply with SAS 70 Type II guidelines for physical and logical security and resiliency. http://www.astoriasoftware.com/ http://www.translations.com/

Once Upon a Time…

… there was SVG. People were excited about it. Adobe and others supported it. Pundits saw a whole new graphical web that would leverage SVG heavily. Heck, I even wrote a book about it. 

Then things got quiet for a long time…

However, there are some signs that SVG might be experiencing a bit of a renaissance, if the quality of presentations at a recent conference is a strong indication. It’s notable that Google hosted the conference and even more notable that Google is trying to bigfoot Microsoft into supporting SVG in IE, a move that would substantially boost SVG as an option for Web developers.

So a question for those out there interested in SVG. Where are some big projects out there? Are there organizations creating large bases of illustrations and other graphical content with SVG? I would love to talk to you and learn about your projects. You can email me or comment below.

UPDATE: Brad Neuberg of Google, who is quoted in the InfoWorld article linked above, sent along a link to a project at Google, SVG Web, a JavaScript library that supports SVG on many browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. According to the tool’s website, using the library plus native SVG support, you can instantly target ~95% of the existing installed web base.

UPDATE: Ruud Steltenpool, the organizer for SVG Open 2009, sent a link to an incredibly useful compendium of links to SVG projects, tools, and other resources though he warns it is a little outdated.

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