Industry Trend:
Content Management -- How Did We Get Here?
By Jabin White

Recently I presented a webinar called “What Publishers Should Know About Content Management,” and in putting together my presentation I thought a lot about the progress – and lack thereof – of content management over the years.

It made me think about the huge amount of misinformation and resulting frustration in the publishing community about the term Content Management, and the reasons for this. During the session, I was asked a similar question about the gap between unfulfilled expectations and reality in this area, and it really made the matter hit home.

Content Management may be near the top of a long list of over-hyped and misunderstood terms out there, although one can argue that it has gotten better in the past few years. But to fully appreciate this “gap,” we must go back a few years to look at the root causes.

Think back to the turn of the century, the time known as the “Dot Com bubble.” Lots of companies were rushing to get to the web, publishers included. Publishers had really been there already, but they were, as always, looking for more efficiency to be gained in the production process.

Enter content management, and content management vendors. Or more accurately, vendors who performed some aspect of content management. One of the problems was that the term content management came to symbolize what were, in fact, lots of diverse technologies. Document management, workflow, digital asset management, and web content management each have unique characteristics and should be thought of separately, but they were all thrown under the umbrella of content management, hence the confusion.

This was made worse by the fact that the potential market for these services suddenly became as large as one’s imagination, as every business could conceivably have the need to “manage” content. As a result, lots of non-publishers were suddenly in the game, and oh, the promises they made. You can start to see how the gap was created, as vendors eager to please made promises and sales. Publishers, hoping to take advantage of the promises of content management, soon hit the wall of realization that publishing for publishers sometimes has a very different meaning than publishing for non-publishers.

But it’s gotten better.  Through the frustration and disappointment of the early 2000s, smart companies have realized that many of the old publishing truisms still hold. Careful thought about the structure of content, workflows, and product creation needs should drive decisions about content management, not the other way around.

The vendor landscape is stabilizing, and the good CMS systems are making strides. And while there are some success stories out there, others may need to overcome their hesitancy and fears based on unmet expectations of a few years ago. It is clear that content management is still a promising technology for publishers, and can pay big dividends in areas of content acquisition, enrichment, enforcing rights and permissions, and multiple product deliveries from the same source content.

As long as we keep those pesky expectations in line.

Next Newsletter: Where are we now with content management, and where are we going?

Jabin White is Silverchair’s Vice President of Marketing, and can be reached at jabinw@silverchair.com.

---

Interview:
B. Tommie Usdin, President, Mulberry Technologies

Tommie Usdin is the founder and president of Mulberry Technologies, an XML and SGML consultancy in Rockville, MD, that writes XML Vocabularies (DTDs and schemas), teaches about XML and related technologies, and helps with hardware/software selection and workflow/process reorganizations. In addition, Usdin is the founder and organizer of many XML conferences, including the GCA’s SGML conferences from 1991 through 1997, the Extreme Markup Conferences through 2007, and the new “Balisage: The Markup Conference.”  She was kind enough to take time out from her busy schedule to grant Silverchair this interview:

SC: How did you get into SGML, and later XML?

BTU: Before SGML, I was working in a group that was making full-text searchable databases. This was back in the days when to make a book into a searchable database you waited until the book was printed, then sent two copies to be re-keyed and re-proofed, and then loaded a database. Once you had tested the database, you submitted a query and, less than a day later, you got a list of the documents that met your search criteria. And the users thought this was wonderful: real information from our documents, in under a week! So we were right there when SGML came along, with its promise of re-purposable tagged content. I led teams building SGML applications for 10 years.

I followed XML by list-serv during its development and it really did seem to be the good-parts version of SGML. Mulberry added it to our toolbox as quickly as we could, teaching a number of XML-for-SGMLers classes. 

XML came to dominate my consulting practice as soon as we had XSLT. XSLT made good on the promises we made about how easy things would be with SGML. In the SGML world it was possible to use the same source in multiple ways, and it was reasonable to assume that your content could be tool-independent, but working with SGML documents was certainly not easy. With the addition of XSLT—a powerful, popular, easy-to-learn language for transforming documents from one structure to another and from one tag set to another—it became EASY to create content that would outlast tools and work for multiple, possibly unknown, applications.

(There are people who call me a Luddite because I didn’t drop SGML as soon as the first XML tools were available. But I don’t believe in dropping an old technology until and unless it no longer meets the users’ needs or there is a clear business advantage to changing to a newer one.)

SC: Tell us what Mulberry Technologies does.

BTU: Mulberry Technologies, Inc. is a consultancy specializing in XML (and SGML) text-based applications. That means that we help organizations who are working with marked-up prose: books, journals, reference works, technical documentation, teaching materials, legislative documents, medical and drug information, and a wide variety of other text applications.

Mulberry services include:

• Consulting, including helping organizations figure out:

• where XML will help their workflow

• who needs to learn what in order to add XML to their processes

• what vocabulary/tag set(s) would best meet their needs; if a public tag set fits (either as published or with customization)

• what tools they should buy and/or build

Training, including:

• conceptual training for managers, focusing on the business issues relating XML

• hands-on XML, XSLT, Schematron, and XSL-FO for production people and programmers

• training on specific tag sets and applications

Vocabulary development:

• creation and documentation of tag sets/vocabularies

• customization of public vocabularies to meet organization/project needs

• expression of models in the language(s) appropriate to the use, user, and selected tools, including DTD, XSD, RELAX NG, and Schematron

SC: Do you remember the first DTD you wrote?  How would you improve on it with what you know today?

BTU: I was on the team that wrote the AAP (Association of American Publishers) DTDs, the first published DTDs that were developed in the early 1980s while SGML was a moving target. (I didn’t write those DTDs, and don’t want to steal Joan Knordel and Sperling Martin’s thunder; I was a minor supporting player.) The AAP DTDs were widely adopted (and adapted) by publishers worldwide for modeling books and journal articles. These DTDs later became, and are still in use as, ISO 12083.

I have been enormously fortunate in that I don’t have to speculate on how I would improve on that effort with what I know today; I am on the team that developed and now maintain the journal and book tag sets for the National Library of Medicine. These XML tag sets, developed 20 years after the AAP DTDs, are in many ways aimed at the same uses and users: publishers, archives, and libraries. The differences are significant, and based on the benefit of 20 years of tag set experience:

• XML, not SGML

• more transparent naming

• more flexible models

• variations optimized for different purposes: archiving, publishing, and authoring

• easy customization

• modeling that is compatible with current practice in commercial publishing.

SC: You wear many hats (President of Mulberry, conference organizer, frequent speaker, industry thought leader).  What is your favorite role, and why?

Conference organizing gives me an opportunity to meet and work with a lot of people I wouldn’t be likely to encounter otherwise. While working on a conference, people are positive, thoughtful, and cooperative; conferences bring out the best in people. Competitors work together to present coherent panels; academics and vendors listen to each other with respect.

Even more fun than the conference itself is the development and preparation process, including: talking with would-be speakers about their topics, matching papers to peer reviewers (who provide critical reviews for the organizers and helpful advice for the author), and cooperating to select a program that is excellent, varied, and balanced.

This year I am working with a group of people I really respect and admire to develop a new conference called “Balisage: The Markup Conference.” Balisage will focus on both practical and theoretical aspects of XML and other markup technologies.

SC: Where do you think we are right now in making progress toward the Semantic Web?

BTU: Well, if I knew what “the Semantic Web” was, I could probably give a sensible answer to that. The problem is that I have heard way too many definitions, and all they seem to have in common is that they include “something really cool.” 

There are a few “islands” of rich semantically marked-up content on the web, in which users can do highly precise, targeted searches and retrieve small amounts of information that meet their needs, and follow that information to other sources. And I think it is likely that there will be more of these “islands” in the future. However, creating these (and their links) takes a lot of planning, a lot of work, a lot of money, and the knowledge and cooperation of a lot of people; in other words, it doesn’t just happen. And “the semantic web” will not just happen; people who need rich retrieval will create the content to meet their needs if and when there is sufficient need.

SC: What are the advantages of semantics in data?

BTU: Especially in the publishing world, moving from proprietary systems to XML-based systems is justified because the publisher wants to create “value-added information products.” Usually, they mean that they want to enable users to find exactly the content needed at a particular moment, quickly and easily, and perhaps also to make the user aware of other related information that may be useful to them then. Maybe they can interact with the data and make it their own. Semantically tagged data provides the “hooks” necessary to create such information products. By knowing, for example, what words or phrases are drug names, or product names, or place names, it becomes possible to index to this information, to traverse it, and to link to it and from it imaginatively.

SC: Generally speaking, how are publishers and information providers doing with smart implementations of XML and related technologies?  What kind of good things are you seeing? What are you NOT seeing?

BTU: I see significant variations in the degree to which publishers and information providers are implementing XML and related technologies. I hesitate to characterize any publisher’s technology decisions as “smart” or “not smart;” technology decisions are business decisions and must be made in concert with a complete business plan. Some publishers are moving XML into the very beginnings of their workflow and are planning new products based on the library of rich semantically tagged content they are building up in their repositories. Others have made a well-informed business decision to stick with traditional publishing process for most, or even all, of their material and at the time that they want to develop an electronic product using some content they are converting that content and only that content into XML optimized for that application. I think well informed publishers can make a variety of good technology decisions.

Now that you ask, I realize that in the last few years I have seen fewer and fewer technology decisions made on the basis of an article in an in-flight magazine or a recommendation from a tool vendor; publishers seem to be less susceptible to trends and making better informed business decisions than they were a few years ago.

SC: If a publisher or information provider was just setting up to deliver a new product or content set, what kinds of things should they think about?

BTU: The same things publishers have always thought about: Who will use this product? What will they do with it? How will it differ from other products on the market? What will the users expect from such a product? And only after they are comfortable with the answers to those questions, they should think about how to create and maintain the content, which will include both human and technological aspects.

In other words, publishers need to be publishers first, and work with technology second, and in support of the publishing activity. There is a tendency, especially among technology tool vendors, to encourage enthusiasm for the technology. I think this is harmful; no technology will make a business successful if it isn’t used to support a sensible business model.

SC: What trends or technologies are you seeing that have you excited about the future, either short-term or long-term?

BTU: I see less and less hype and more and more calm use of sensible technologies. I see people using XML, not because it is the NEXT BIG THING but because it is a technology that allows them to do things they need to do with their content. It gets them out of just print-on-paper and lets them move their content to the next level(s).

I also see fewer and few people getting religious about tag sets (DTDs or schemas) and more and more talking about converting content from one tag set to another as needed.

In other words, I suppose the community of markup users is maturing. And I like it.

SC: What is your favorite “gadget?”

BTU: The “time remaining” clock. It doesn’t tell you what time it is; it doesn’t display any numbers at all; it is an analog device that shows, graphically, how much time remains for what-ever task you have set for yourself. We use it at conferences, where it tells speakers that they have lots more time, or a little more time, or that they have better wrap it up – all with an ever shrinking wedge of red. It is also useful at workshops and in other group activities, where it tells people that time is slipping away and they need to get to work.

---

Product Launch:
Silverchair Re-Launches AccessScience for McGraw-Hill

In August, Silverchair completed the development and re-launch of McGraw-Hill’s flagship science and technical information site, AccessScience.

Designed for researchers and students looking for the most relevant, readable and trusted sources of scientific information available, AccessScience includes the 10^th Edition of McGraw-Hill's Encyclopedia of Science & Technology, research updates from the McGraw-Hill Yearbooks of Science & Technology, a dictionary of science, biographies of significant scientists, and late-breaking news from all areas of science.  The website also includes more than 15,000 images and multimedia objects spanning a variety of scientific disciplines. These include hundreds of Flash animations, news videos, and topic-specific image galleries.

The re-design of AccessScience shows the advantages of using Silverchair's semantic web architecture on the Silverchair Content Manager (SCM) platform to manage a massive amount of complex, rich content.  AccessScience users can experience vast amounts information through a variety of methods, including searching, topical browsing, or A-Z browsing.  A greater level of semantic linking is also enabled at the article level through "For Further Study" links.  The 15,000+ images and multimedia objects are also semantically linked around different topics.

AccessScience is the latest McGraw-Hill website developed and customized on Silverchair’s SCM web platform.  It joins AccessMedicine (http://www.accessmedicine.com), AccessSurgery (http://www.accesssurgery.com), AccessEmergency Medicine (http://www.accessemergencymedicine.com), AccessPharmacy (www.accesspharmacy.com) and Harrison Online en Español (http://www.harrisonmedicina.com).

---

Silverchair, 310 East Main Street, Charlottesville, Virginia 22902, USA  ·   T: 434.296.6333  ·  F: 434.296.3027 ©2007 Silverchair  |  All Rights Reserved  | Silverchair.com|  Privacy Policy