Benefits of a media-neutral content repository

A growing number of companies that publish print content are grappling with the issue of finding a way to repurpose legacy content in a cost-effective manner. They maintain Quark files, for example, on a secure network server or tape backup, but it's difficult, time-consuming, and labor-intensive to grab the articles from storage everytime someone wants a reprint.

These companies know that although their content management system may work perfectly to produce a newsletter every week, a journal every month, or a new edition of a book every year, it doesn't work at all when leveraging content in other ways and for other mediums.

That's where extensible markup language (XML), content-specific databases, and other media-neutral formats come in. By identifying your core content — the content most important to your business and most suitable for repurposing — and then converting that content to a media-neutral format, you can gain a number of key benefits, including:

• Greater inventory control over content
• Reduced time-to-market
• Reduced front-end development costs
• Increased revenue from licensing content "on the fly" (custom publishing)
• Increased workflow efficiency — making a change to the cost of a product, for instance, is made in one place only
• Increased revenue from content leveraged in new markets and formats.

Content richness

XML provides the added benefit of being able to maintain the full richness of the content. Richness is a term applied to the semantic meaning of each piece of content. (For more information about XML and its benefits, visit XML: The Site at Software AG.)

For instance, in a typical publishing environment, the tag or style H1 is used to define how an output program such as Quark renders the content tagged as H1. "Make all H1s appear as 18pt Helvetica Bold" is an example of the meaning attached to most content styles. Such tags indicate how the content should be displayed but not what the content is.

XML, custom databases, and to an extent, standard generalized markup language (SGML) can be used to define the meaning of each style. An H1 that appears in one type of content might indicate that an entry within the chapter is starting. In another type of content, the same H1 tag might indicate the beginning of a chapter, not an entry.

The tagging structure of a media-neutral language, particularly XML, can be used to maintain the meaning of the content and is thus more useful for repurposing. The same repository can be used to generate HTML files for display on the web, tab-delimited files for import into a database, or Microsoft Word for reuse in the standard editorial process.

Summary

Overall, a media-neutral repository can offer almost unlimited flexibility in how content is used and reused. With that flexibility comes an enhanced ability to respond to changing market.

Contact HealthEdit for more information about managing content with a media-neutral content repository.