Just a quick post to highlight some (fairly) recent research from Outsell entitled XML: The Necessary Ingredient for Information Publishing (paid, $695) based on a survey run early this year. While the survey had only 30 respondents, so you must generalize with care, I still think the results are interesting and illustrative.
Excerpt from the introduction on how XML can help information providers go web 2.0:
In our view, XML should be a key ingredient in any publisher’s or information provider’s toolkit. It is virtually impossible to envision a content purveyor that couldn’t gain significant advantage form XML usage, expert perhaps for a one product, paper-only publisher — and such a vendor would be an anachronism.
Another excerpt, this one more of a primer on the basic problems solved by XML technology:
Some examples of [the problems solved with] XML in action
- Content integration, bringing together and normalizing structured and unstructured content …
- Content repurposing, using content in multiple products …
- Multiple delivery formats, satisfying clients’ demands for custom content delivery …
- Fine-grained searching, … more granularity than a simple keywords
- Content syndication, partnering with other players requires the ability to integrate, normalize, and repurpose content from multiple sources
My single favorite piece of the report was this table [edited for brevity]:
Business Problem XML Solution Product content exists in multiple formats and cannot be repurposed XML can be used to create a canonical set of tags that rationalize disparate formats. Automated tools can take Word, PDF, text, and other file formats, and tag their structure. Publication processes are “hardwired” for each product due to product-specific format XML enables creation of an “author once, publish many” process where content is created once then tagged for use in multiple products Clients demand custom delivery formats and each variation requires its own software XML schemas can be used to tailor content delivery to client-requested formats Content and format are intertwined, making it difficult to change either XML enables separation of content and format using CSS or XHTML. Search engines return long lists of documents with actual search results buried inside the documents. Search is limited to key words and phrases. XQuery is XML’s standard query language, enabling subdocument search and construction of very specific searches and queries.
The report then continues on to provide some results of the survey (50% of those surveyed have 50%+ of their content in XML), and then provides case studies of four XML user organizations.
There are brief write-ups on several vendors: Mark Logic, Really Strategies, Nstein, and ePublishing.
The report concludes with some business-oriented action items for those interested in the power of XML technology. The report was written by Outsell’s Marc Strohlein who has the unique background of having worked as both an media industry technology analyst as well as a media industry CIO.
1 response so far ↓
1 Paper on Research // Nov 19, 2009 at 5:26 am
Many institutions limit access to their online information. Making this information available will be an asset to all.
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