Just Double the Recipe

Since Silverchair started web publishing 10 years ago, we’ve been touting the benefits of simultaneity—the ability to publish a large content set to the web and a smaller subset in print at the same time. This model makes a lot of sense when there’s a substantial market for the book but there’s lots more excellent content than can be put on paper and still keep the book price accessible.

In December, McGraw-Hill published an excellent example of this model—the new 7th edition of Fitzpatrick’s Dermatology in General Medicine, edited by Klaus Wolff et al. This authoritative textbook of dermatology, respected for its integration of basic and clinical science, was published in print at a hefty 2,752 page count, including 3,344 of both four-color and halftone illustrations. Meanwhile, the online version of the book, available at www.accessmedicine.com, contains about 1,000 pages of additional text, more than 500 additional images, and 18,000 additional references.

McGraw-Hill awarded Silverchair the opportunity to play chef for this content feast; we provided full-service editorial production and composition services for the book, and we provided conversion, production, and development services for the web version. And the complete set of content was served up on AccessMedicine when the books were ready for sales and distribution. How did we do it?

When we composed the book, we coded the electronic-only material as “conditional text” and produced galleys that included all the material--print and electronic--so that the authors could review all of it for accuracy and corrections. We then made actual page proofs for the print version, though our files still contained the “hidden” electronic-only material.
Once the print book content was nailed down and final, we generated XML for the online version from our XML-friendly paging files. This data included all of the print text and the online-only materials.

Using XML-friendly paging software allowed us to work from one “superset” of content, with multiple outputs to different formats, with the print version containing a subset of the material to keep the size of the book manageable without compromising the breadth and depth of coverage of the important dermatology topics.

We’re proud of this example of our commitment to making the technology work for King Content.

--Kim Langford

There is More Than One Way to Write an 80/20 Rule

In selecting a new platform for your enterprise healthcare web application, no option is going to be precisely perfect. Every project has a series of idiosyncratic requirements and structures that must be handled with platform configuration (or customization) during implementation. But different platforms take different approaches to covering as many requirements as possible in their standard configuration. And those different approaches can create striking differences.

Which scenario would your enterprise prefer: A software platform that completely addressed 80% of your project's requirements and did not address 20% very well or a solution that addressed 80% of *each* requirement?

I believe the rational choice is the former over the latter.

In modern web applications with thousands of individual (and very specific) functionality requirements, it seems more effective (and efficient) to be able to focus your team's energy on the remaining 20% your platform does not cover natively. That 20%, after all, is normally unique to the content, organization, or field (including such requirements as high-definition videos for surgeons and multiple skin magnification options for dermatopathologists). The 20% are generally features that provide your application with the most "wow" factor and differentiation. Those unique requirements are better addressed with the full focus of the development team rather than have their efforts scattered among the other thousand.

That approach is the philosopy of the Silverchair Content Manager (SCM) platform. The SCM platform team has rigorously tested its major functions (including search, browse, contextual connections using semantics) against the professional healthcare information consumer and refined these features to match their particular use models. We purposefully do not make default platform decisions in areas of great variance -- we prefer to address those specifically as solutions to individual projects.

In contrast, platforms such as Microsoft's SharePoint application and other generic CM platforms are alluring due to their wide breadth of "included" features. But upon examination of each individual feature, it is easy to see that each one has been genericized to the point where it is less than 100% effective. The more specific the needs of your industry (or industry sub-category), the further each feature resides from your use model. In professional healthcare, therefore, each one must be customized to some extent just to match the thought and analysis that is already infused in the SCM platform's core features. It is no coincidence that SharePoint customization is a booming software service industry -- each deployment requires a heavy amount of customization across the board before it comes close to meeting the original requirements and differentiates itself in the market.

--Jake Zarnegar, Silverchair CTO

The importance of precision in markup

Here is hoping you had a safe and happy holiday season. During the holidays, I had an experience in buying a present that made me think about the importance of markup, and more importantly the necessity to be precise when dealing with markup.

My brother-in-law, like me, is a big Boston Red Sox fan, so I wanted to give him some kind of item with the team logo on it, but something a bit different than a T-shirt. A few searches and I finally found the perfect item, a set of Red Sox logo slippers on Amazon. I made the purchase, but then was surprised to see the following (image below) when I checked out. You may have to expand the image to see it, but there it is, plain as day. People who bought this item (Boston Red Sox slippers) also bought the following item (New York Yankees slippers).

Excuse me?

For those of you who are not baseball fans, these two teams -- and more importantly, their respective fans -- hate each other. The very idea of a Red Sox fan also buying anything embossed with the Yankees' logo, or vice versa, is ridiculous. It would be like a member of the Hatfields ordering a McCoy's T-shirt, or someone from North Carolina ordering a pair of Duke slippers. Just ain't gonna happen.


So why was this an option on the Amazon site? Clearly the products are similar on one level (ie, they are both slippers), and perhaps someone buying every slipper for every Major League Baseball team would want to know about the other teams available, but is this useful information for a Red Sox fan? I think not.

I should note here that I am aware of *how* this information got there. The logic on the Amazon site is pretty machine-driven, and clearly someone purchased both of these slippers, so the result is technically valid. But there's a world of difference between markup that is technically correct and markup that is useful (it's roughly the same as the distance between Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium).

That made me think about markup, and the *purpose* of markup. Serving up different "planes" of knowledge can be accomplished by machine pretty easily. Take a hammer. If the system shows a hammer, that's a tool, so it shows all other tools. That can be pretty useful to someone performing a search on different types of tools. But one of the main benefits of semantic markup is to improve the meaning, and precision, of searching and finding. "If you searched for *this*, you might also be interested in *that.* A noble goal, but it is not as simple as it may seem.

Enter intelligent, precise, semantic markup.

Surely there is no harm in the Amazon example I've cited -- I can simply chose to not order an item with the Yankees' logo. But when doing a search or browsing for information of a more academic nature -- for example, professional medical content -- the serving up of related items that are related but not useful, can, at best, mislead and, at worst, mis-inform.

I am reminded of the quote attributed to physicist Richard Feynman, who said: "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." Items served up by semantics should not just be related on any plane, but the connections they enable should be useful (certainly not in all cases, but the connections should be discernible by a reasonably intelligent person, and most certainly not cause confusion). This is a tall order, but can be accomplished by the intelligent insertion of semantic data by subject-matter experts (read: humans) who can ask and answer the important questions about the content, and how it will be consumed.

--Jabin White