Essential Tools Of An Xml Workflow2003comp

What You Need To Know To Get Started Essential Tools of an XML Workflow

Topics We’ll Cover
Steps before implementation
Workflow throughout the organization
Common tools of a publishing workflow
Tagging – what it is and how to do it
XML Functions – the acronyms

Steps Before Implementation

Where Are You?
Existing IT infrastructure
Strengths
Weaknesses
Company’s appetite for change
Corporate approach to purchasing
Scalability
Output
What are you going to be producing?
How much?

Some questions to ask
Is our database of products and components complete?
Do we have any issues with versioning?
How effective are we at meeting internal or external deadlines?
Do we face any issues related to content quality?
How effective are we when it comes to retrieving book content files?
Who holds the PDFs and production files, and is this working well?
How often and how effectively do we use content to market or sell titles?
How effectively can we publish in new or non-standard formats?

Workflow Throughout the Organization

Sample XML Workflow

Authors
Most currently use Word
Most publishers have author guidelines
Word has XML functionality – incorporate this into the guidelines or revise guidelines to include XML editor
Supply a list of keywords for the book
Supply a list of keywords for each chapter
Work with editor to tag and “chunk”

Acquiring Editors
Decide whether the book should exist just as a print product, or can be repurposed into other products
Ebooks, chapters, iterative publications (O’Reilly’s Rough Cuts), excerpts

Developmental Editors
Tagging content for meaning/context (work with author and copy editor)
Confirming best use of content for acquiring editor’s additional products
Enforcing author guidelines
Product management of title

Production
XML workflow is very concrete
Tagging for format – chapter head, front matter, etc.
Apply a pre-defined stylesheet and transform
Work with compositor and render the different products

Marketing
Target specific audiences for the content (based on the context tags)
Work with acquiring and developmental editors to create new products
Work with production to design new packages
SEO/SEM on individual books so that they come up in search results (Google)

Subrights
Rights information stored with the content, not in separate files
You know by looking at the XML for any document which rights you have
No more digging through files or contacting the agent/author

What’s In Your Toolbox?

Common Tools of Publishing Workflow
Word processing (authors and editors)
Design (stylesheets, transforms)
ERP systems
Title management
DAM
Conversion
DAD

Word Processing
MS Word 2007
Has XML export functionality
Most commonly used word processor/people are used to it
Not writing in native XML means exports are inconsistent due to conversion
Open Office – XXE
Native XML word processor
Learning curve on interface
Requires you to know your doc’s structure before writing its content
Eliminates conversion issues – docs are tagged appropriately at the outset

Design
Adobe InDesign
Create or import tag taxonomy in InDesign
Use those tags to distinguish various attributes or elements in the doc
Edit XML structure within InDesign
Export an XML file
Quark
Similar functionality to InDesign
Less used in book publishing than InDesign
Open Source options
Not a lot out there just now for production/design use

Third-Party Systems
ERP – finance, inventory
Title Management – production workflows, budgeting, marketing
DAM – digital asset management
DAD – digital asset distribution

What it is and How to do it Tagging

Tag: You’re It
Formatting tags
Chapter heads
Subtitles
Section heads
Context tags
“ This is a recipe”
“ This is about John Adams”
Similar to indexing

Who Tags What When
Authors – contextual keywords
Editors – contextual keywords, structural elements
Production/Design – structural elements
Marketing – SEO keywords, marketing terms
Subrights – rights metadata and tags

How to Tag
Carefully
No standard tagging interface exists yet – must do in native XML (can be outsourced with lists)
No standard contextual tagging taxonomy (apart from BISAC categories) exists yet
No industry standard contextual taxonomy exists for chunk-level tagging
Consensually
Talk with other pubs about what they are doing
No one publisher will have the single solution
Industry standards make books sale-able – without them, pubs have to rely on viral sales
Book Industry Study Group will have to get involved

The acronyms and gibberish Alphabet Soup

XML Functions
XPATH
XQUERY
XSLT
XSL-FO
Schematron

XPATH
Query language that selects certain nodes or tags from an XML document
Ex: if a user wants to display only the chapter elements in a document, the XPath query goes through the document and selects only the chapter elements for display, leaving the rest of the document alone.
A way of navigating through an XML document and filtering what is not relevant at that particular time.

XQuery
A query language for collections of XML documents in a repository (as opposed to querying a single document)
Uses XPath syntax, as well as some SQL-type syntax to supplement
Crawls through multiple documents and selects particular attributes for display – useful for combining aspects of documents together to form new documents

XSLT
Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations
Translates an XML document into a human-readable document (or another XML document).
Used as a conversion tool between different XML schemas
Also a way of converting an XML document into an HTML or plain-text document
Uses XPath to identify certain tags and process them a specific way.

XSL-FO
A stylesheet language for formatting objects
Like XSLT and XPath, it is a component of XSL – Extensible Stylesheet Language
Is most often used to generate PDFs, which are then used to print documents onto paper
Was designed to format printed, paged media, as opposed to screen-based reflowable media

Schematron
A validation language that uses XPath to describe patterns in an XML document
Supplements DTDs and XML schemas, and ferrets out errors in XML files
Schematron rules can be converted into style sheets, making the construction of XSLs much more automated

Useful Links
TOC/StartWithXML – http://toc.oreilly.com/startwithxml
Book Industry Study Group – http://www.bisg.org
Free newsletter, “The Big Picture” – http://www.ljndawson.com/The_Big_Picture/Newsletter_Subscription/
Email me w/questions – [email_address]

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Essential Tools Of An Xml Workflow2003comp

by ljnd on Dec 12, 2008

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Essential Tools Of An Xml Workflow2003comp — Presentation Transcript