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Best, Karl
 Burlington 
 Enigma, Inc. 
 USA 
 		Karl F. Best
 Director, Product Marketing
Enigma, Inc.
  200 Wheeler Rd. Burlington (Massachusetts)  USA (01803)
Email: karlb@enigma.com Web site:www.enigma.com
 Biography
 Karl F. Best is Director of Product Marketing at Enigma, a leading provider of electronic publishing solutions. Prior to Enigma, Karl worked at Novell and Sun Microsystems designing and implementing electronic documentation authoring and delivery system, and at Adobe where he was the manager of FrameMaker+SGML developer support. Karl has been active in the SGML/XML industry for several years, serving on a variety of standards committees and speaking at numerous industry conferences. He was recently a Director and Chief Strategy Officer for OASIS.
 

Document information is not just for documents anymore

 Content providers historically have been faced with the challenge of building "end-to-end" systems for authoring, management, and publishing of document collections. In many respects, these systems have brought significant productivity gains. But, while new levels of efficiency and automation have been achieved with thisdocument -centric approach, the scope of the efficiency gains has been limited to the document production department. The end-to-end solution locked the information into moving along a single set path; using that information in new ways or linking it to other applications was difficult.
 The next step past today's "end-to-end" moves the content beyond thedocument . Structured information is not just for documents anymore. Information handlers should "think outside the box" to discover new uses for their information.
 New technologies are promising to expand the boundaries of "end-to-end" beyond the publication department. Enterprise web-based applications such as e-commerce and parts requisitioning, ERP, training, field maintenance, and customer support each effect or are affected by publication content. Expanding the boundaries of the publication into these areas transforms your document systems from efficiency tools to revenue-generating applications. Information, rather than being a cost or a burden, has now become a potential revenue-generating product.
 When "end-to-end" only consists of the author-manage-publish combination, the measurement of its impact is measured by just one factor: cost savings for publication production. While this factor is extremely important, focusing strictly on this one parameter may result in missed ROI opportunities such as increased revenues from spare-parts sales, increased after-market and follow-on sales, and higher utilization of content by customers. Furthermore, a production-centric measurement can also cause inappropriate decisions to be made -- decisions that save money in publication production but cost even more further down the knowledge chain.
 Not entirely by coincidence, the emergence of an expanded "end-to-end" definition comes at the same time as the emergence of XML. While originally a document-centric technology, XML has been discovered to have a much broader range of uses.
 XML's impact has already been felt in server-to-server systems development, enabling cleaner and faster integration of multiple enterprise systems. This, in combination with XML's strength in the document world, creates an environment where multiple enterprise systems, document-based and RDBMS-based, can be integrated using a common interchange language. In this way, the difference between "document" and "data" is blurred, furthering the goals of the organization to improve knowledge flow.
 Thinking beyond the traditional author-manage-publish model has led to the development of systems that include the following:
 
  •  After being authored, managed, and published, information may go through further processing. Publishing is not the end of the line for information, which may be retrieved from a database and authored and published again. The author has a head start on writing the new document.
  •  Further processing is not restricted to information coming just out of a database. Published documents may also be revised and republished by the recipient of the publication. The re-publisher has a head start on publishing, and the reader of the combined publication has one less document to consult because the new information is integrated into the original publication rather than published separately.
  •  Linking various types of information together in useful ways has blurred the distinction between documents and various types of exchange information. For example, linking the documentation for a maintenance procedure to the list of parts required for that procedure, further linked via e-commerce to a parts ordering system, means that the user of that documentation has everything he needs under a single interface, with no inaccuracies from consulting different publications or from entering the same information in multiple places.
  •  The act of publishing information from a database can become continuous and automatic, rather than a one-time event. Each time source information is changed just that portion of the publication is re-published then integrated into the original. Publishers don't need to compare changes to and recreate documents on a regular basis, and readers always have the most current and correct information available in a single publication.
  •  Automated retrieval of feedback from readers' annotations for inclusion into future revisions of the publication gives authors hundreds or thousands of reviewers and document testers. Because the process is automated user input is gathered more efficiently. Tying user response to specific locations in the publication increases the usefulness of the comments to the author. All of this leads to more accurate information in the publication.
 At some point "publishing" becomes a very loose term with no certain definition. Where historically the term has meant ink and paper, and has more recently expanded to include electronic publications such as CDROM or web, the exact medium used no longer matters and the difference between media becomes very blurred. While it will probably still mean "dissemination of information" for some time longer, the term "publishing" increasingly means a fluid, on-going process, rather than a one-time or single-point-in-time event. Information can flow in multiple directions, including from the the user back to the producer. To follow this trend, a publisher of information should ignore the end-to-end model and think more in terms of continuous streams and cycles of information use.
Dynamic Content Delivery - Our Challenges   Table of contents   Indexes   Meta-model technology: concepts and applications.