Many have wondered about what the semantic web and publishing can offer each other. (By “publishing” here, I mean “making content available in one media or another, ideally to make money”.) After following a lot of writing and discussions in these two worlds—and they are surprisingly separate worlds—I have a few ideas and wanted to write them up where people could comment on them.
My old friend Dale Waldt (I remember, immediately after the announcement of the existence of XML at SGML 1996, going up to my then-coworker Dale and asking “So what do we think?”) recently posted an entry on the Gilbane XML blog titled Why Adding Semantics to Web Data is Difficult. A few days ago I posted a comment saying that the things that he saw as missing from semantic technologies are actually already there and working well, but my reply hasn’t shown up yet, so after a…
After joining twitter last April, I entered the following as my second entry a month later:
Lookout engadget, it’s my first consumer electronics scoop: at Digital Book 2008 today, Sony reader business development managers Bob Nell and Daniel Albohn, who were not listed on the online or printed programs, made a surprise presentation: they showed that Sony has worked out how to display ebooks in the standard epub format on the PRS-505. Nell started up the Adobe Digital Editions reader and dragged a DRM-free epub book and a PDF version of Suze Orman’s book “Woman and…
The idea of single source publishing is at least as old as SGML. You store one version of your content with all the information necessary to create other the versions (typically, a print version plus the electronic formats du jour), and then you develop automated routines to create those other versions from the central, “single” source. The central content gets updated as necessary, and you create new publications by running the appropriate routines to generate the other formats. By…
When people talk about Digital Rights Management, or DRM, the real subject of their discussion is usually Digital Rights Enforcement. The basic use case seems to be how to prevent a teenage boy from duping “Rush Hour II” for his friends, or some variation thereof—what you add to the DVD storing the movie, what you add to the players to check on the DRE components of the DVD, and so forth.
