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Using Data Structure Standards to Foster Efficiency and Opportunity

 
This presentation describes how organizations -- particularly businesses focused on creating and distributing content -- can use data structure standardization to realize operating efficiencies and new business opportunities.

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Outline

  • Developing a Standard: XML-based data structures, metadata, and taxonomies
  • Cultivating Efficiency: Overview followed by a discussion of how organizations can use standardization to foster efficiency
  • Creating Opportunity: Overview followed by a discussion of how organizations can use standardization to realize new business opportunities
  • The Business Web: Closing remarks about preparing for the future now.

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Using XML for Data Structure Standards

XML is the language of choice for standardizing and enforcing data structures.
 Its hierarchical and extensible nature makes it well suited for formally structuring data.
 Its extensibility enables it to include rich sets of metadata -- an aspect of standardization that helps make businesses more efficient.
 XML enables interoperability and expedites data exchange over the Internet -- as evident with the explosion of XML-based data exchange languages like FPML -- which is a key to realizing new business opportunities, especially in the era of the "business web."

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Developing and Implementing a Standard

A data structure standard can be implemented in XML with a Document Type Definition or a Schema.
Depending on its unique needs, a business can use an existing DTD or develop its own.
Using an existing standard, such as NewsML, may make it easier to distribute data to other businesses.
To develop a standard, an organization identifies and defines the structural and semantic elements and attributes of its data, and fuses the resulting definition with mechanisms for specifying metadata at multiple levels. The standard strives to separate content from presentation.
Content is validated against the DTD to ensure conformity with the standard.

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Metadata

As we will see, a standard that includes a rich set of metadata mechanisms increases the potential for efficiency and opportunity.
An organization has several options for extending its standard to capture metadata:
  • Define its own
  • Use an existing standard (or aspects of them)
The approach depends on the current and future needs of the business and the characteristics of its data.
Future needs may be indeterminable: It may prove productive later to use multiple approaches now.

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Taxonomies

 Businesses can use taxonomies to organize content into logical groupings that bring efficiencies in managing, navigating, and locating data.
XML is well suited to formulating hierarchical arrangements that structure information within a specific body of knowledge.


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Existing Metadata Standards

Here are a few of the existing metadata standards:
  • RDF: The Resource Description Framework (RDF), an architecture for web metadata designed to support the reuse and exchange of vocabularies as a layer in XML documents. The W3C sees it as a key driver of the Semantic Web.
  • Dublin Core Metadata Initiative: It is developing interoperable metadata standards for describing resources that enable intelligent information discovery systems while supporting a broad range of purposes and business models.
  • Prism: The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata. Defined in RDF using the Dublin Core vocabulary, it is a publishing-specific XML metadata standard for directing the processing of content. It allows content and related resources to be formally described by providing standardized properties, controlled vocabularies, and extensibility.
  • OWL: The Web Ontology Language is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans, facilitating greater machine interpretability of web content.
  • XML Topic Maps: XTM provides a model and grammar for representing the structure of information resources used to define topics, and the associations (relationships) between topics.

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Overview: Fostering Efficiency

Data structure standards, including mechanisms for specifying metadata, enable organizations to foster efficiency by
  1. Automating the processing of content
  2. Improving work flow
  3. Reusing content
  4. Reducing redundancy and repetition
  5. Improving searches, storage, archives, retrieval
  6. Automating the gathering and reporting of statistics and other data
  7. Consolidating the use of software

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Automated Processing

Data structure standards enable businesses to automate the processing of content, making them more efficient while reducing the costs associated with manual work. The possibilities are virtually endless. For instance, publishers can do the following:
  • Trigger the application of stylesheets to transform structured content into formats suitable for different web sites, different publications, or different devices, such as mobile phones; stylesheets can also be applied to transform the content into an XML dialect that can be shared with business partners. For instance, a business could transform XML content from an in-house dialect into NewsML for distribution to external media partners.
  • Automate the distribution of content to a variety of channels
  • Automate the distribution of content to analysts for review and refinement
  • Assemble content dynamically with queries based on metadata or other aspects of the standard
  • Automatically generate tables of contents, indexes, site maps, link libraries, topic maps, and other navigational aids

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Streamlining Work Flow and Sharing Data

The automation that comes with standardization, along with a content management system, can make an organization's work flow more efficient:
  • Metadata can be used to automatically route data through a given work flow, not only internally but also with external business partners
  • Example: Editorial production at a newspaper, with syndication
On a general note, sharing knowledge within an organization requires cooperation. Standardization can, if executed with the appropriate metadata, provide a formal model for cooperative sharing.

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Reusing Content

Standards that separate content from presentation empower organizations to reuse and repurpose content:
With standardization, documents can include references to other documents or segments of them, making the business more efficient by enabling it to reuse existing resources.
Documents can be assembled automatically with existing content, in response to user requests.
Standardization can also radically increase efficiency by enabling an organization to publish the same content in multiple formats.
Standardization also enables organizations to automatically include related sidebar content.
All of which reduces the cost of creating information products.

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Eliminating Redundancy

Standardization helps eliminate redundancy and repetition of data:
  • Data is created once and then reused by reference, rather than recreated or, for instance, cut and pasted.
  • Repetition of manual work both in structuring data and the work flow is reduced or eliminated.

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Storage, Search, Retrieval

Standardization can revolutionize the way organizations store data, bringing massive efficiencies in searching and retrieval.
  • Semantic-based structures provide meaningful hooks for searching stored data.
  • The appropriate use of structured metadata makes search and retrieval more efficient and effective: Users can more quickly find exactly the data they seek.
  • Taxonomies or ontologies that express concepts common across an organization's domains result in well-defined mappings between domain-specific knowledge representations, producing efficiencies in cross-domain searching, data mining, and knowledge extraction.

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Report Capabilities

Along with a content management system, standardization and metadata provide vehicles for
  • Tracking the status of documents and data
  • Compiling statistics about what content was delivered to whom when.
The resulting reports help organizations become more efficient by focusing on productive avenues of information usage and improving access to important streams.

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Software Consolidation

Standardization eases software costs and yield efficiencies by consolidating the tools needed to create content. All authors, for instance, could use an XML-based tool like Epic Editor or XMetal.
The costs associated with training users in different software are reduced.

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Overview: Realizing New Business Opportunities

Data structure standards and the interoperability they yield bring new business opportunities by enabling organizations to
  1. Syndicate and redistribute content, both internally and externally
  2. Contextualize and focus advertising based on content (both in print and online)
  3. Personalize content
  4. Aggregate diverse content based on user profiles for presentation to the user
  5. Segment related content into customized products
  6. Develop and refine niche products
  7. Tap new outlets and launch new products
  8. Translate and localize content
  9. Deliver content to multiple output devices

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Syndication and Redistribution

Because data with formally defined structures can be easily shared, standardization forges new business opportunities through the possibility exchanging data.
  • An organization can channel its content to other internal business units or external business partners

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Targeted Advertising

A well-defined data structure standard uses metadata to capture the meaning and relationships of content, opening up the possibility of
  • Serving contextualized advertising based on content, both in print and online
  • Serving contextualized advertising based on a user's request for on-demand content

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Personalized, Aggregated, and Segmented Content

Standardization can help retain existing customers and attract new customers by enabling companies to
  • Deliver personalized content (with advertising targeted to user's profile)
  • Aggregate content across domains to sell to external business partners
  • Segment content so users can select only segments of direct interest or aggregating segments into new, customized products

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Developing Niche Products

Standardization gives organizations the ability to develop niche products by helping to identify marketable subsets of content (through, for instance, tracking) or by combining content from various domains in new and unique ways.
Example: A publisher of business magazines may be able to recombine discrete pieces of content from multiple magazines into a new stream of unified content that has value to a specific set of consumers.
(Information from magazine on celebrity lifestyles + information from yachting magazine = business stream on selling yachts to celebrities.)

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Tapping New Outlets and Launching New Products

Standardization also gives organizations the prospect of developing new opportunities through
  • Creating dynamic content in response to user requests or profiles
  • With standards in place, it is easier to develop and launch new content-based products such as web sites.

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Translating, Localizing, and Internationalizing Content

An organization can engineer its standard to use abstract structures for aspects of content tied to locale -- for example, currency -- to ease localization.
There are also standardization methods that improve the efficiency of translating or internationalizing content.
The result: An organization can introduce its offerings in new locales, cultures, and languages.

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Single Sourcing

An XML-based standard that separates content from presentation provides the foundation for delivering content in multiple output formats.
This enables businesses to find new opportunities by distributing their content to new channels. (Formatting is done with stylesheets.)
  • WML: mobile devices
  • HTML: web sites
  • XML: business exchange partners
  • XSL:FO: magazines, books, brochures

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Thriving on the Business Web

We are at the cusp of the "business web" -- a worldwide network of interconnected business services.
Businesses well positioned to exploit it will thrive.
Making an organization's core data and services available through other companies can vastly increasing the market for those services and data.
Data structure standards that enable the rapid and innovative dessimination of business services and information -- including through other companies -- may well be one of the keys to integrating into and thriving within this environment.

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About this Document

This presentation was created using IBM's Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), a topic-oriented DTD, and a customized XSLT stylesheet.

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