Having recently attended IDEAlliances Tech Conference in Chicago I was pleasantly surprised to see so many passionate people supporting the idea of standards and, most importantly, actively taking part in developing them. Most of the publishers present already had some of these standards in place. However when implementing anything in an organization, it needs to be supported to grow in order to ensure its success. There was plenty to learn at this conference between the hands-on labs and the intense sessions and the thought-provoking discussions.
I cannot emphasize enough how important standards are to both individual organizations and to the industries they are in. Sending data and information across the end-to-end digital media supply chain inside and outside of an organization must have some commonality in the core technology, otherwise the repercussions will be costly in time and resources. From creation, production, management, to delivery of knowledge-based multimedia content, content moves fast.
During the Tech Conference in particular, Dianne Kennedy, VP Emerging Technologies for IDEAlliance, gave an in-depth presentation during “NEXTPUB & the Future of Media Production”. She revealed the work of nextPub Specifications 1.0, which is a semantically enhanced HTML framework that publishers can use to deliver magazines and rich content across multiple platforms efficiently and cost effectively. Later in the week she also went into depth in her other presentations with HTML 5 and PRISM standards.
David Riecks of David Riecks Photography gave smart and practical examples during his hands-on lab session “Using Metadata to Create Smart Asset”. His focus was XMP standards but he made sure to emphasize that controlled vocabulary is key.
Another session that stood out was “Introduction to Rights Management.” In this session Linda Burman, LA Burman Associates, provided an overview of the many issues of rights management, particularly as publishers bring content to tablets. Linda gave a great overview on the definitions and terminology, analyzing the business requirements, the role of technology, applying a metadata standard and PRISM Usage Rights (PUR). It is truly amazing how complex Rights Management is but Linda explained how you can manage rights in your DAM or CMS in a thoughtful and sensible manner.
This conference is not the only outlet where IDEAlliance continues to develop standards while enhancing efficiency as they have also launched IDEAdvisors, which will provide training and development from the experts. They currently offer a 2-day workshop on Rights Management implementation. It is so new that there isn’t information up on their site yet, but you can contact Linda Burman – linda(at)laburman.com or Dianne Kennedy – dkennedy(at)idealliance.org for more information.