NextPage 
Provo Young, Russel
| XQL- and HyTime-based content reuse using a content management system | Table of contents | Indexes | XML Europe 2000 | |||
| NextPage Provo Young, Russel | Russel W. Young |
| Director of Product Development |
| NextPage |
| 5072 North 300 West
Provo
(Utah)
(84604)
Email: Russ.Young@nextpage.com |
| Biography |
| Russ and his wife Chris have 3 children, Chantel, Sawyer and Ashton. His other hobbies include golf, volleyball, landscaping, gardening, stone masonry, and playing the piano. |
Introduction |
Electronic Commerce |
Information Commerce |
| Two typical examples of information commerce: |
| The media that are involved in the traditional information commerce processes include magazines, forms, catalogs, letters, phone, fax and mail. The involvement of and requirement for multiple media increase the cost and overhead of making a sale happen. The excitement with electronic commerce is that everything that supports the transactions can occur on a single medium - the Internet. These include web pages, e-mail, online catalogs, online databases, transaction systems and payment systems. |
Electronic Information Commerce |
| Electronic Information Commerce is the intersection of electronic commerce and information commerce; where the information gathering, order capture, financial transactions, information fulfillment, and information consumption occurs online. |
Information Marketplace |
| The marketplace for electronic information commerce is growing at a rapid pace. Much of this market is predictable, since it is a replacement for existing businesses. Since the internet medium is new, much of this market is new which creates new opportunities and challenges for publishers. It is helpful to think of three types of markets for information: |
The Consumer Market |
| This market is characterized by an individual's need to access information. Examples of this kind of information are newspapers, magazines, stock reports, journals, travel info, real estate, etc. The previous example of buying a book at a bookstore is a good place to start. Using the Internet, that same person can often find the information that he is looking for - often at no cost to him - usually faster than a trip to the bookstore. This search involves going to the portal of choice, entering a query, and wading through the hit results until the answer is found. In many cases, the query will need to be modified and several search engines will need to be checked. Just because an answer was found, however, doesn't mean that the answer was correct. The user still has to make a judgement call about which document is most relevant for the purpose. An important characteristic of this model is the published content becomes part of an overriding community of interest that involves more than just information publishing. Chat rooms, personal home pages, bulletin boards, specialized product stores, and newsgroups are other important technologies for creating a community of interest. |
Advertising Model | |||||||||||||||||||
| In this example, the information transaction occurred without a financial transaction between the end user and the information publisher. The presence of the published information is supported financially by advertisements that run alongside the content. The loyalties that end users or members have to a particular online community determine the amount of advertising revenue that can be generated. As the number of visitors to a site increases, the cost and amount of advertising increases, which allows the amount of content that can be published to increase as well. |
Subscription Model | |||||||||||||||||||
| The other business model that is being used in the consumer market is subscriptions. In most cases, the publishers for these sites will provide free information to attract the casual user and host premier information that is available to subscribed members only. Some examples of subscription sites are the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition and ESPN Sportszone. Most subscription sites support free trial periods for members in order to encourage enrollment. |
Content Syndication | |||||||||||||||||||
| An interesting opportunity for publishers is content syndication. Publishers can sell the rights to their publications to be hosted through an online community. The syndication can be either a reference to the publisher's site or a copy of the published content that is customized for the members of the specific online communities. In the case where the exposure to an already-established membership is substantial, a publisher will pay for the service of hosting the content. |
The Professional Market |
| This market is characterized by the need of a group of professionals to access a particular set of information in order to do their job. Law reviews, tax codes, financial data, scientific and academic journals are some examples of professionally oriented publications. Information commerce in the professional market differs from that in the consumer market in several ways: |
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Internet delivery | |||||||||||||||||||
| The publisher can host the content on one or more Internet sites and can provide content subscriptions. Since the data is targeted for a professional market, the subscription system should support groups of users as well as individuals. Such a system authenticates a user before granting access. The subscription system recognizes that this user belongs to this group or corporate entity and grants access rights based on the company license. Along with periodic invoices, a corporation will receive usage reports that detail how the group subscription was used. |
Intranet delivery | |||||||||||||||||||
| A natural extension of the Internet hosting model is to license the content for hosting on a corporate Intranet. A corporation has faster access to the content due to the increased bandwidth and avoids Internet security concerns by hosting the content inside the corporate firewall. The content can also be merged into collections of similar content, whether the content is licensed from another publisher or internally created. Corporate knowledge officers then have the power to create information collections of all the relevant published material that is available, so that these collections can be searched together by the knowledge workers of the corporation. |
| The subscriptions to this content should allow for time limits as well as concurrent user limits. The cost of the subscription can either be negotiated offline, specifying who has access to what content, or the cost can be fixed and purchased online, directly from the publisher website. Trial periods allow the publisher and the corporate users to determine what information is needed and by whom. Since the licenses to the information will expire over time, the systems should support a way to update both the licenses and content automatically over the Internet, appropriately debiting the corporate account. |
CD-ROM delivery | |||||||||||||||||||
| Although more and more people are getting connected, there are still reasons to access information while disconnected from the Internet. CD-ROM is a great way to deliver information to users that are always or sometimes disconnected from the web. Publishers need to produce updates to information as it changes. End users need to incorporate those updates with the data already delivered on CD-ROM. |
The Corporate Market |
| Corporations have traditionally done publishing as a way to support its primary business. The Internet, intranets and extranets have changed the way that corporations view electronic publishing. Some of these publishing operations have turned a traditional cost center into a revenue-generating machine. In fact, it the availability of good information about a product that leads to higher sales of the product. Although the information may not be the product for sale, the information reduces the overall cost of the sale. |
| Corporations also need to publish information to their employees via their corporate intranet. Although this is not directly a commercial publishing opportunity, corporations want to integrate their internally published information with the information that they have bought from commercial publishers. The advantage is that the employees can search the entire collection of information together rather than separately. User level access control can be leveraged to give personal views of the information that is published on a corporate intranet. |
Information Commerce Technology |
Electronic Publishing |
| Electronic publishing tools are used to find, filter, deliver, retrieve, secure and sell information. Compare how the Internet and CD-ROM allow for different ways of distributing information. |
|
Publisher Opportunities |
| The biggest opportunity for publishers is that they can provide their users access to up-to-date information. They can also open up new distribution and communication channels, which leads to the generation of additional revenue. A publisher can provide a unified storefront to all of their products whether those products are hardgoods or softgoods. For example, they can sell the books and journals, CD-ROM products, as well as offer the content of those products online. This way the customer services can be integrated for all of the products that are sold. The publishers should take advantage of the new communication channels that are part of the online community. Customers that feel involved in the community will give valuable feedback to the publisher. |
| Depending on their size and resources, publishers can participate in an online community that someone else is hosting or create their own. A commerce service provider (CSP) can host published content and provide the infrastructure of services required for electronic commerce, including payment and transaction services. |
| By storing the membership databases online, the publisher can customize the content for individual users. Hierarchical membership systems allow corporations, departments, and individual users to view content with varying degrees of access. As the user interacts with the system, the system learns about the user and can customize the content and delivery for each user. This can also involve e-mail systems that send an a-mail with an embedded digital offer for a product, like having a "Buy Me!" button. The system provides an online transaction service that handles the different types of purchases that a consumer wants to make, including both hardgoods and softgoods. It also handles various payment types, like credit cards, digital cash, digital coupons, and offer digital receipts. |
Publisher Challenges |
| For every opportunity that is presented to the publisher, several questions arise. The five significant challenges to commercial publishers are: |
Security | ||||||
Financial Model | ||||||
Transaction services | ||||||
Production process | ||||||
Online Delivery | ||||||
End-user Opportunities |
| The biggest advantage for users of information commerce systems is having access to up-to-date information. There is a lower barrier to entry for individual users as they can just buy what they need rather than buy an entire volume. Larger collections of information can be searched, the content can be personalized, and the results can be downloaded quickly. |
End-user Challenges |
| One of the biggest challenges for users is finding the information they need. Most users would prefer to search the information they are about to buy before they purchase it. Infrequent users usually prefer to buy documents one at a time, while frequent users prefer subscription models so the information they need is always there. Users want to personalize their individual information portals and how that information gets delivered to their desktop. The ability to reuse and print the information is also sometimes a challenge for users of Internet publishing products. |
Working EIC Examples |
Financial publishing |
Legal publishing |
Religious publishing |
E-Books |
XML-Based Publishing |
| A classic publishing error is that a new publishing medium arises which requires a new data format and the entire production process is changed as a result. For example, many HTML documents are created for web publishing, but the inherent structure of the documents is lost as a result. XML, on the other hand, is well suited for content publishing due to its properties of simplicity and reusability. Author the document once and use it for every available distribution medium. The online value proposition of XML is that it increases the value of the information being delivered. First of all, the high structure of the information makes intelligent searching possible. Instead of simple Boolean searching common to the Internet, contextual searching is possible. Since the formatting of the document is not tied to the document, the information delivery can be customized for every user and for every output device. The structure of the document also allows for hierarchical purchasing models, which base the price of the content on the types of elements that are being accessed. |
| XML is flexible in that it can be both a model for the information that is being stored and delivered as well as the protocol for machine to machine communication of the back end transaction systems. The tools for XML provide for simpler content authoring, management, conversion and delivery; in essence, it lowers the barrier to entry into electronic information commerce. |
Conclusion |
| Although Electronic Information Commerce is in its infancy, the Internet provides publishers new opportunities and challenges for generating revenue and empowering users to access real-time information. |
| XQL- and HyTime-based content reuse using a content management system | Table of contents | Indexes | XML Europe 2000 | |||