The separation of data and documents has been something of an accident of history and in reality no such separation exists. Many of the granules of content that we refer to as data items only have meaning and utility with reference to documents that provide the governing definitions and authority. On the other side, what we typically refer to as documents very often assemble these data items into structures and communication events that give to data the force and impact of instructions. With the emergence of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and later the Extensible Markup Language (XML), organizations had a way to create, manage and leverage documents in such a way that also made its data contents accessible. Not all projects attempted to follow this fact to its logical conclusion but some did and this presentation will look more closely at several of these cutting-edge adventures in order to extract the lessons learned. While not all of these projects could be called a success, and a couple might even be branded cataclysmic disasters, the reasons for both success and failure tell us a great deal about the true nature of content and the fusion of data and documents.
What stands out from this survey of past and current adventures is that where a manageable strategy can be established for integrating data and document content an entirely new class of publishing applications comes to life. Where we see genuine "content fusion" we find the ability to deliver absolutely personalized content that can, for example, adapt as the physical location of the user changes such as is needed for certain security controls to be effective. We also find that the range of content consumers grows several-fold as applications become publishing targets in addition to individual users and suddenly content is being channelled into CAD systems, manufacturing control tools, decision support environments and enterprise systems. The quality parameters that then come into play for the integrated content rises to never-before-seen levels.
As one of the key lessons learned, we do find that this journey uncovers as many new challenges as new benefits. It turns out that neither past authoring practices nor past tools and techniques for managing content have had to confront challenges of this type before. The rising occurrence of the challenges surrounding content fusion is however driving important changes in such standards as DITA which has been progressively improving its support in this regard. There is also optimism to be taken from the fact that there have been past adventures attempting to realize a more complete fusion of data and documents and that these past adventures offer us one of the best resources for moving into a brave new world of intelligent content.
Joe Gollner leads a team of specialists at Stilo in the design, development and delivery of state-of-the-art content processing solutions that leverage the proven OmniMark platform. Joe has worked in the content management market, with an emphasis on open standards and large-scale systems, for over 20 years and he has implemented dozens of systems across a variety of industry sectors. He was educated in a wide range of subjects at Queens University (B.A.) and the University of Oxford (M.Phil.) and has completed graduate programs in project management, business analysis and knowledge management.