This document discusses Simon & Schuster's efforts to automate their book cover design process using MarkLogic Server. It describes the problems with their previous manual workflow, including inconsistent formats, sizes, and inputs. Their solution was to create a single source of standardized cover information in XML format, and use MarkLogic to combine this with XML versions of their InDesign templates to automatically generate "white layouts" for designers. The automation has helped address issues around coordination and errors, but designers still manually select templates and provide final touch-ups. The system demonstrates how XML and content management technology can help publishing workflows.
The document discusses several major issues regarding North Korea including its isolationist policies, struggling economy, ongoing rivalry with South Korea, and active nuclear program. It outlines the historical political division of Korea that led to separate North and South governments. North Korea now suffers from food shortages, poor infrastructure, and spends heavily on its military and nuclear activities, which are a source of international concern.
This document contains a list of photos from the 2nd Garin Shomrat Reunion held in Shomrat, Israel on August 9, 2008. The photos are from the East Coast pre-Shomrat years between 1967-1970 and are credited to various individuals who provided the slides. It thanks all those who contributed photos to the reunion.
Reproex is an Argentine furniture manufacturer with over 30 years of experience in ready-to-assemble furniture. They operate a 10,000 square meter factory and distribution center in Buenos Aires. Their product line includes entertainment centers, desks, wardrobes and other furniture pieces designed for easy assembly. Reproex focuses on quality, using imported machinery and qualified personnel to produce high-end furniture. Each product is carefully packaged with assembly instructions to fulfill customer requirements.
This was a presentation given at the end of an internal company training seminar on web design. It discusses where the digital lifestyle is headed and how it relates to our company.
This is an internal company presentation given at web design training seminar. It was about web typography and understanding the way type works within the web world.
I presented this PowerPoint 2007 presentation to the meeting of the Committee of Editors of the Min. of Infrastructure in Jerusalem on Nov. 7. The distances might not be accurate to the 10s of meters. But they are not far off, when we consider how far objects will fly should there be an explosion at the plant. The 600 meter ring refers to the minimal safety distance that the explosion of natural gas might endanger for anyone LIVING in that area. Exactly...that doesn't mean that 700 meters isn't dangerous.
Building an XML workflow: Tools and key considerationstoc
Steve Waldron discussed tools and considerations for building an XML workflow. He explained that XML is a core technology for many software companies and publishers due to its flexibility and ability to transform content for different media. Waldron outlined various XML tools and highlighted that the right tools depend on an organization's goals and publishing strategy. He provided examples of how publishers like Elsevier and DailyLit use XML in different ways to manage content and deliver it across multiple platforms. Overall, Waldron argued that XML is fundamental for organizations that develop complex products, produce content at scale, or want to deliver content through various print and digital channels.
This document provides an introduction to MongoDB and Python. It discusses how to install and run MongoDB, set up a Python environment connected to MongoDB, perform basic read and write operations on MongoDB collections from Python. It also covers common patterns for modeling data in MongoDB like embedding documents and indexing, and integrating MongoDB with popular Python web frameworks.
The document discusses several major issues regarding North Korea including its isolationist policies, struggling economy, ongoing rivalry with South Korea, and active nuclear program. It outlines the historical political division of Korea that led to separate North and South governments. North Korea now suffers from food shortages, poor infrastructure, and spends heavily on its military and nuclear activities, which are a source of international concern.
This document contains a list of photos from the 2nd Garin Shomrat Reunion held in Shomrat, Israel on August 9, 2008. The photos are from the East Coast pre-Shomrat years between 1967-1970 and are credited to various individuals who provided the slides. It thanks all those who contributed photos to the reunion.
Reproex is an Argentine furniture manufacturer with over 30 years of experience in ready-to-assemble furniture. They operate a 10,000 square meter factory and distribution center in Buenos Aires. Their product line includes entertainment centers, desks, wardrobes and other furniture pieces designed for easy assembly. Reproex focuses on quality, using imported machinery and qualified personnel to produce high-end furniture. Each product is carefully packaged with assembly instructions to fulfill customer requirements.
This was a presentation given at the end of an internal company training seminar on web design. It discusses where the digital lifestyle is headed and how it relates to our company.
This is an internal company presentation given at web design training seminar. It was about web typography and understanding the way type works within the web world.
I presented this PowerPoint 2007 presentation to the meeting of the Committee of Editors of the Min. of Infrastructure in Jerusalem on Nov. 7. The distances might not be accurate to the 10s of meters. But they are not far off, when we consider how far objects will fly should there be an explosion at the plant. The 600 meter ring refers to the minimal safety distance that the explosion of natural gas might endanger for anyone LIVING in that area. Exactly...that doesn't mean that 700 meters isn't dangerous.
Building an XML workflow: Tools and key considerationstoc
Steve Waldron discussed tools and considerations for building an XML workflow. He explained that XML is a core technology for many software companies and publishers due to its flexibility and ability to transform content for different media. Waldron outlined various XML tools and highlighted that the right tools depend on an organization's goals and publishing strategy. He provided examples of how publishers like Elsevier and DailyLit use XML in different ways to manage content and deliver it across multiple platforms. Overall, Waldron argued that XML is fundamental for organizations that develop complex products, produce content at scale, or want to deliver content through various print and digital channels.
This document provides an introduction to MongoDB and Python. It discusses how to install and run MongoDB, set up a Python environment connected to MongoDB, perform basic read and write operations on MongoDB collections from Python. It also covers common patterns for modeling data in MongoDB like embedding documents and indexing, and integrating MongoDB with popular Python web frameworks.
The document discusses an agile publishing model developed by Sourcebooks, Inc. that aims to be more reader-centric, efficient, supportive of authors, and timely. It involves developing content based on reader needs through a community network of users and creators. The model emphasizes starting with the customer experience, gathering feedback, iteratively developing modularized content, and experimenting to build what readers want. It also aims to better support authors financially and with marketing/sales. An example project to develop and publish the book "Entering the Shift Age" using this agile model is described.
Whitepaper channel cloud computing paper 2Ian Moyse ☁
In Part One we discussed how cloud computing is changing the historic landscape of the channel as we know it and what to expect. In Part Two we will look at what areas of cloud computing you should consider and what you can do about it.
This document provides an overview of the book "Microservices for Java Developers" by Christian Posta. It discusses how businesses are shifting from a product-focused model to a service-focused model where they provide ongoing value to customers. It also discusses how technology is becoming increasingly commoditized, driving down costs. The book will provide hands-on examples of developing microservices using Java frameworks like Spring Boot, Dropwizard, and WildFly Swarm. It will cover deploying microservices at scale using Docker and Kubernetes and demonstrate clustering, failover, and load balancing techniques.
Benchmark of ecommerce solutions (short version, english)Philippe Humeau
This study covers 12 e-commerce solutions in-depth : Websphere commerce, Oracle Commerce, Hybris, Intershop, Magento, Prestashop, RBS Change, Oxid eShop, Drupal Commerce, Zen Cart, Open Cart, Virtuemart.
Full version is available here: http://www.nbs-system.co.uk/blog/benchmark-of-e-commerce-solutions.html
After more than 6 months of analyses, dozens of interviews with editors and a tool developped internally to find out the market shares of each solution, our Benchmark of e-commerce solutions came out in 2013, screening 12 solutions through 160 pages.
The new version of this benchmark will be published in 2016.
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology company headquartered in New York. IBM manufactures computer hardware, software, and offers consulting services across over 170 countries. IBM is also a major research organization and has invented technologies like the ATM, floppy disk, hard disk drive, magnetic stripe card, SQL, UPC barcode, and DRAM. IBM continually shifts its business mix by exiting commoditizing markets and acquiring companies in higher-value markets. Known as "Big Blue", IBM is one of the largest employers worldwide with nearly 380,000 employees as of 2016.
This document provides biographies of the authors and technical editor of the book "Understanding Big Data: Analytics for Enterprise Class Hadoop and Streaming Data". The authors include Paul C. Zikopoulos, Chris Eaton, Dirk deRoos, Thomas Deutsch, and George Lapis. They each have extensive experience in data management, Big Data technologies, and IBM products. The technical editor is Steven Sit, who is a Program Director at IBM's Silicon Valley Research lab developing Big Data platforms.
The document discusses the concept of "ShadowOps", which refers to when business units circumvent central IT organizations to rapidly deploy new capabilities using public cloud infrastructure. This can occur when central IT is slow to respond to business needs. The document outlines some examples of ShadowOps activities and notes potential risks. It argues that central IT needs to adopt DevOps techniques to streamline delivery processes and provide reusable services in order to compete with ShadowOps approaches and better support business innovation.
Total access building and delivering a stand-out investor presentationJoyce Chuang
The document provides guidance on building an effective 12-slide investor presentation, including templates and examples for key slides such as the title slide, problem statement, solution, competitive advantages, financial projections, management team, and summary. Key recommendations include crafting a concise "one liner" and "elevator pitch," using customer stories and quotes to validate problems and solutions, and focusing communication on the most important merits of the business for investors.
Total access: building and delivering a stand-out investor presentationPemo Theodore
The document provides guidance on building an effective 12-slide investor presentation. It outlines key components such as developing a concise one-liner and elevator pitch, telling a compelling problem story with customer validation, explaining the solution and market opportunity clearly with supporting graphics, and translating technical details to demonstrate value without clutter. The document advocates focusing communication on the most important merits to get internal champions and progress to due diligence.
This document provides an introduction to microservices for Java developers. It discusses the benefits of a microservices architecture, including allowing teams to focus on providing individual services and making changes independently. It also covers some of the challenges of building distributed systems using a microservices approach. Finally, it provides an overview of some Java frameworks that can be used to implement microservices, including Spring Boot, Dropwizard, and WildFly Swarm, and technologies like Docker and Kubernetes that can be used to deploy microservices at scale.
Content management means different things to different people. For publishers, the fundamental aspects should be metadata, content markup, and component management.
Presentation originally developed by Apex VP and Principal Consultant Bill Kasdorf for the benefit of an international institutional publishing office in 2014.
Oracle Social CRM Applications Strategy Overview And RoadmapAndrew Wong
The document discusses how businesses are using social media to increase sales. It notes that by 2009, 3 out of 4 Australians had visited a social networking site. The document then discusses how companies are using social applications like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter for activities like meeting people, building relationships, asking and answering questions, and building trust and reputation in order to convert leads into sales. It also presents Oracle's social CRM products that integrate social networks with CRM systems to facilitate activities like tracking customer buying patterns, creating sales campaigns, and sharing sales content.
Saving money by adopting an XML based Meta Data Workflowtoc
Panelists address how savings can be obtained through the use of XML and style sheets, efficient rights management, and a digital production workflow. (Werner Fischer, Klopotek North America)
Mastering Your Customer Data on Apache Spark by Elliott CordoSpark Summit
This document discusses how Caserta Concepts used Apache Spark to help a customer master their customer data by cleaning, standardizing, matching, and linking over 6 million customer records and hundreds of millions of data points. Traditional customer data integration approaches were prohibitively expensive and slow for this volume of data. Spark enabled the data to be processed 10x faster by parallelizing data cleansing and transformation. GraphX was also used to model the data as a graph and identify linked customer records, reducing survivorship processing from 2 hours to under 5 minutes.
Monday, January 14, 2012 presentation on 3 different data types (unstructured, structured and semi-structured) and how xml plays a role in content management systems, onix (bibliographic data sharing), RSS (real simple syndication) and xml-first publishing for ebooks.
The Affiliate Masters Course is an intensive 10-DAY course on becoming a
High-earning affiliate champion.
How? By “building income through content,” the proven, C T P M way!
An affiliate business is one of the easiest ways to get your feet wet in e-business.
You send visitors (i.e., potential customers) to a merchant’s Web site that you are
Representing. If they buy or complete a required action (for example, fill in a
Form), the merchant pays you a commission. No fuss, no muss!
Essentials of Automations: Exploring Attributes & Automation ParametersSafe Software
Building automations in FME Flow can save time, money, and help businesses scale by eliminating data silos and providing data to stakeholders in real-time. One essential component to orchestrating complex automations is the use of attributes & automation parameters (both formerly known as “keys”). In fact, it’s unlikely you’ll ever build an Automation without using these components, but what exactly are they?
Attributes & automation parameters enable the automation author to pass data values from one automation component to the next. During this webinar, our FME Flow Specialists will cover leveraging the three types of these output attributes & parameters in FME Flow: Event, Custom, and Automation. As a bonus, they’ll also be making use of the Split-Merge Block functionality.
You’ll leave this webinar with a better understanding of how to maximize the potential of automations by making use of attributes & automation parameters, with the ultimate goal of setting your enterprise integration workflows up on autopilot.
Skybuffer SAM4U tool for SAP license adoptionTatiana Kojar
Manage and optimize your license adoption and consumption with SAM4U, an SAP free customer software asset management tool.
SAM4U, an SAP complimentary software asset management tool for customers, delivers a detailed and well-structured overview of license inventory and usage with a user-friendly interface. We offer a hosted, cost-effective, and performance-optimized SAM4U setup in the Skybuffer Cloud environment. You retain ownership of the system and data, while we manage the ABAP 7.58 infrastructure, ensuring fixed Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and exceptional services through the SAP Fiori interface.
The document discusses an agile publishing model developed by Sourcebooks, Inc. that aims to be more reader-centric, efficient, supportive of authors, and timely. It involves developing content based on reader needs through a community network of users and creators. The model emphasizes starting with the customer experience, gathering feedback, iteratively developing modularized content, and experimenting to build what readers want. It also aims to better support authors financially and with marketing/sales. An example project to develop and publish the book "Entering the Shift Age" using this agile model is described.
Whitepaper channel cloud computing paper 2Ian Moyse ☁
In Part One we discussed how cloud computing is changing the historic landscape of the channel as we know it and what to expect. In Part Two we will look at what areas of cloud computing you should consider and what you can do about it.
This document provides an overview of the book "Microservices for Java Developers" by Christian Posta. It discusses how businesses are shifting from a product-focused model to a service-focused model where they provide ongoing value to customers. It also discusses how technology is becoming increasingly commoditized, driving down costs. The book will provide hands-on examples of developing microservices using Java frameworks like Spring Boot, Dropwizard, and WildFly Swarm. It will cover deploying microservices at scale using Docker and Kubernetes and demonstrate clustering, failover, and load balancing techniques.
Benchmark of ecommerce solutions (short version, english)Philippe Humeau
This study covers 12 e-commerce solutions in-depth : Websphere commerce, Oracle Commerce, Hybris, Intershop, Magento, Prestashop, RBS Change, Oxid eShop, Drupal Commerce, Zen Cart, Open Cart, Virtuemart.
Full version is available here: http://www.nbs-system.co.uk/blog/benchmark-of-e-commerce-solutions.html
After more than 6 months of analyses, dozens of interviews with editors and a tool developped internally to find out the market shares of each solution, our Benchmark of e-commerce solutions came out in 2013, screening 12 solutions through 160 pages.
The new version of this benchmark will be published in 2016.
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology company headquartered in New York. IBM manufactures computer hardware, software, and offers consulting services across over 170 countries. IBM is also a major research organization and has invented technologies like the ATM, floppy disk, hard disk drive, magnetic stripe card, SQL, UPC barcode, and DRAM. IBM continually shifts its business mix by exiting commoditizing markets and acquiring companies in higher-value markets. Known as "Big Blue", IBM is one of the largest employers worldwide with nearly 380,000 employees as of 2016.
This document provides biographies of the authors and technical editor of the book "Understanding Big Data: Analytics for Enterprise Class Hadoop and Streaming Data". The authors include Paul C. Zikopoulos, Chris Eaton, Dirk deRoos, Thomas Deutsch, and George Lapis. They each have extensive experience in data management, Big Data technologies, and IBM products. The technical editor is Steven Sit, who is a Program Director at IBM's Silicon Valley Research lab developing Big Data platforms.
The document discusses the concept of "ShadowOps", which refers to when business units circumvent central IT organizations to rapidly deploy new capabilities using public cloud infrastructure. This can occur when central IT is slow to respond to business needs. The document outlines some examples of ShadowOps activities and notes potential risks. It argues that central IT needs to adopt DevOps techniques to streamline delivery processes and provide reusable services in order to compete with ShadowOps approaches and better support business innovation.
Total access building and delivering a stand-out investor presentationJoyce Chuang
The document provides guidance on building an effective 12-slide investor presentation, including templates and examples for key slides such as the title slide, problem statement, solution, competitive advantages, financial projections, management team, and summary. Key recommendations include crafting a concise "one liner" and "elevator pitch," using customer stories and quotes to validate problems and solutions, and focusing communication on the most important merits of the business for investors.
Total access: building and delivering a stand-out investor presentationPemo Theodore
The document provides guidance on building an effective 12-slide investor presentation. It outlines key components such as developing a concise one-liner and elevator pitch, telling a compelling problem story with customer validation, explaining the solution and market opportunity clearly with supporting graphics, and translating technical details to demonstrate value without clutter. The document advocates focusing communication on the most important merits to get internal champions and progress to due diligence.
This document provides an introduction to microservices for Java developers. It discusses the benefits of a microservices architecture, including allowing teams to focus on providing individual services and making changes independently. It also covers some of the challenges of building distributed systems using a microservices approach. Finally, it provides an overview of some Java frameworks that can be used to implement microservices, including Spring Boot, Dropwizard, and WildFly Swarm, and technologies like Docker and Kubernetes that can be used to deploy microservices at scale.
Content management means different things to different people. For publishers, the fundamental aspects should be metadata, content markup, and component management.
Presentation originally developed by Apex VP and Principal Consultant Bill Kasdorf for the benefit of an international institutional publishing office in 2014.
Oracle Social CRM Applications Strategy Overview And RoadmapAndrew Wong
The document discusses how businesses are using social media to increase sales. It notes that by 2009, 3 out of 4 Australians had visited a social networking site. The document then discusses how companies are using social applications like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter for activities like meeting people, building relationships, asking and answering questions, and building trust and reputation in order to convert leads into sales. It also presents Oracle's social CRM products that integrate social networks with CRM systems to facilitate activities like tracking customer buying patterns, creating sales campaigns, and sharing sales content.
Saving money by adopting an XML based Meta Data Workflowtoc
Panelists address how savings can be obtained through the use of XML and style sheets, efficient rights management, and a digital production workflow. (Werner Fischer, Klopotek North America)
Mastering Your Customer Data on Apache Spark by Elliott CordoSpark Summit
This document discusses how Caserta Concepts used Apache Spark to help a customer master their customer data by cleaning, standardizing, matching, and linking over 6 million customer records and hundreds of millions of data points. Traditional customer data integration approaches were prohibitively expensive and slow for this volume of data. Spark enabled the data to be processed 10x faster by parallelizing data cleansing and transformation. GraphX was also used to model the data as a graph and identify linked customer records, reducing survivorship processing from 2 hours to under 5 minutes.
Monday, January 14, 2012 presentation on 3 different data types (unstructured, structured and semi-structured) and how xml plays a role in content management systems, onix (bibliographic data sharing), RSS (real simple syndication) and xml-first publishing for ebooks.
The Affiliate Masters Course is an intensive 10-DAY course on becoming a
High-earning affiliate champion.
How? By “building income through content,” the proven, C T P M way!
An affiliate business is one of the easiest ways to get your feet wet in e-business.
You send visitors (i.e., potential customers) to a merchant’s Web site that you are
Representing. If they buy or complete a required action (for example, fill in a
Form), the merchant pays you a commission. No fuss, no muss!
Essentials of Automations: Exploring Attributes & Automation ParametersSafe Software
Building automations in FME Flow can save time, money, and help businesses scale by eliminating data silos and providing data to stakeholders in real-time. One essential component to orchestrating complex automations is the use of attributes & automation parameters (both formerly known as “keys”). In fact, it’s unlikely you’ll ever build an Automation without using these components, but what exactly are they?
Attributes & automation parameters enable the automation author to pass data values from one automation component to the next. During this webinar, our FME Flow Specialists will cover leveraging the three types of these output attributes & parameters in FME Flow: Event, Custom, and Automation. As a bonus, they’ll also be making use of the Split-Merge Block functionality.
You’ll leave this webinar with a better understanding of how to maximize the potential of automations by making use of attributes & automation parameters, with the ultimate goal of setting your enterprise integration workflows up on autopilot.
Skybuffer SAM4U tool for SAP license adoptionTatiana Kojar
Manage and optimize your license adoption and consumption with SAM4U, an SAP free customer software asset management tool.
SAM4U, an SAP complimentary software asset management tool for customers, delivers a detailed and well-structured overview of license inventory and usage with a user-friendly interface. We offer a hosted, cost-effective, and performance-optimized SAM4U setup in the Skybuffer Cloud environment. You retain ownership of the system and data, while we manage the ABAP 7.58 infrastructure, ensuring fixed Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and exceptional services through the SAP Fiori interface.
5th LF Energy Power Grid Model Meet-up SlidesDanBrown980551
5th Power Grid Model Meet-up
It is with great pleasure that we extend to you an invitation to the 5th Power Grid Model Meet-up, scheduled for 6th June 2024. This event will adopt a hybrid format, allowing participants to join us either through an online Mircosoft Teams session or in person at TU/e located at Den Dolech 2, Eindhoven, Netherlands. The meet-up will be hosted by Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), a research university specializing in engineering science & technology.
Power Grid Model
The global energy transition is placing new and unprecedented demands on Distribution System Operators (DSOs). Alongside upgrades to grid capacity, processes such as digitization, capacity optimization, and congestion management are becoming vital for delivering reliable services.
Power Grid Model is an open source project from Linux Foundation Energy and provides a calculation engine that is increasingly essential for DSOs. It offers a standards-based foundation enabling real-time power systems analysis, simulations of electrical power grids, and sophisticated what-if analysis. In addition, it enables in-depth studies and analysis of the electrical power grid’s behavior and performance. This comprehensive model incorporates essential factors such as power generation capacity, electrical losses, voltage levels, power flows, and system stability.
Power Grid Model is currently being applied in a wide variety of use cases, including grid planning, expansion, reliability, and congestion studies. It can also help in analyzing the impact of renewable energy integration, assessing the effects of disturbances or faults, and developing strategies for grid control and optimization.
What to expect
For the upcoming meetup we are organizing, we have an exciting lineup of activities planned:
-Insightful presentations covering two practical applications of the Power Grid Model.
-An update on the latest advancements in Power Grid -Model technology during the first and second quarters of 2024.
-An interactive brainstorming session to discuss and propose new feature requests.
-An opportunity to connect with fellow Power Grid Model enthusiasts and users.
[OReilly Superstream] Occupy the Space: A grassroots guide to engineering (an...Jason Yip
The typical problem in product engineering is not bad strategy, so much as “no strategy”. This leads to confusion, lack of motivation, and incoherent action. The next time you look for a strategy and find an empty space, instead of waiting for it to be filled, I will show you how to fill it in yourself. If you’re wrong, it forces a correction. If you’re right, it helps create focus. I’ll share how I’ve approached this in the past, both what works and lessons for what didn’t work so well.
For the full video of this presentation, please visit: https://www.edge-ai-vision.com/2024/06/how-axelera-ai-uses-digital-compute-in-memory-to-deliver-fast-and-energy-efficient-computer-vision-a-presentation-from-axelera-ai/
Bram Verhoef, Head of Machine Learning at Axelera AI, presents the “How Axelera AI Uses Digital Compute-in-memory to Deliver Fast and Energy-efficient Computer Vision” tutorial at the May 2024 Embedded Vision Summit.
As artificial intelligence inference transitions from cloud environments to edge locations, computer vision applications achieve heightened responsiveness, reliability and privacy. This migration, however, introduces the challenge of operating within the stringent confines of resource constraints typical at the edge, including small form factors, low energy budgets and diminished memory and computational capacities. Axelera AI addresses these challenges through an innovative approach of performing digital computations within memory itself. This technique facilitates the realization of high-performance, energy-efficient and cost-effective computer vision capabilities at the thin and thick edge, extending the frontier of what is achievable with current technologies.
In this presentation, Verhoef unveils his company’s pioneering chip technology and demonstrates its capacity to deliver exceptional frames-per-second performance across a range of standard computer vision networks typical of applications in security, surveillance and the industrial sector. This shows that advanced computer vision can be accessible and efficient, even at the very edge of our technological ecosystem.
Introduction of Cybersecurity with OSS at Code Europe 2024Hiroshi SHIBATA
I develop the Ruby programming language, RubyGems, and Bundler, which are package managers for Ruby. Today, I will introduce how to enhance the security of your application using open-source software (OSS) examples from Ruby and RubyGems.
The first topic is CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures). I have published CVEs many times. But what exactly is a CVE? I'll provide a basic understanding of CVEs and explain how to detect and handle vulnerabilities in OSS.
Next, let's discuss package managers. Package managers play a critical role in the OSS ecosystem. I'll explain how to manage library dependencies in your application.
I'll share insights into how the Ruby and RubyGems core team works to keep our ecosystem safe. By the end of this talk, you'll have a better understanding of how to safeguard your code.
Taking AI to the Next Level in Manufacturing.pdfssuserfac0301
Read Taking AI to the Next Level in Manufacturing to gain insights on AI adoption in the manufacturing industry, such as:
1. How quickly AI is being implemented in manufacturing.
2. Which barriers stand in the way of AI adoption.
3. How data quality and governance form the backbone of AI.
4. Organizational processes and structures that may inhibit effective AI adoption.
6. Ideas and approaches to help build your organization's AI strategy.
Generating privacy-protected synthetic data using Secludy and MilvusZilliz
During this demo, the founders of Secludy will demonstrate how their system utilizes Milvus to store and manipulate embeddings for generating privacy-protected synthetic data. Their approach not only maintains the confidentiality of the original data but also enhances the utility and scalability of LLMs under privacy constraints. Attendees, including machine learning engineers, data scientists, and data managers, will witness first-hand how Secludy's integration with Milvus empowers organizations to harness the power of LLMs securely and efficiently.
zkStudyClub - LatticeFold: A Lattice-based Folding Scheme and its Application...Alex Pruden
Folding is a recent technique for building efficient recursive SNARKs. Several elegant folding protocols have been proposed, such as Nova, Supernova, Hypernova, Protostar, and others. However, all of them rely on an additively homomorphic commitment scheme based on discrete log, and are therefore not post-quantum secure. In this work we present LatticeFold, the first lattice-based folding protocol based on the Module SIS problem. This folding protocol naturally leads to an efficient recursive lattice-based SNARK and an efficient PCD scheme. LatticeFold supports folding low-degree relations, such as R1CS, as well as high-degree relations, such as CCS. The key challenge is to construct a secure folding protocol that works with the Ajtai commitment scheme. The difficulty, is ensuring that extracted witnesses are low norm through many rounds of folding. We present a novel technique using the sumcheck protocol to ensure that extracted witnesses are always low norm no matter how many rounds of folding are used. Our evaluation of the final proof system suggests that it is as performant as Hypernova, while providing post-quantum security.
Paper Link: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/257
Driving Business Innovation: Latest Generative AI Advancements & Success StorySafe Software
Are you ready to revolutionize how you handle data? Join us for a webinar where we’ll bring you up to speed with the latest advancements in Generative AI technology and discover how leveraging FME with tools from giants like Google Gemini, Amazon, and Microsoft OpenAI can supercharge your workflow efficiency.
During the hour, we’ll take you through:
Guest Speaker Segment with Hannah Barrington: Dive into the world of dynamic real estate marketing with Hannah, the Marketing Manager at Workspace Group. Hear firsthand how their team generates engaging descriptions for thousands of office units by integrating diverse data sources—from PDF floorplans to web pages—using FME transformers, like OpenAIVisionConnector and AnthropicVisionConnector. This use case will show you how GenAI can streamline content creation for marketing across the board.
Ollama Use Case: Learn how Scenario Specialist Dmitri Bagh has utilized Ollama within FME to input data, create custom models, and enhance security protocols. This segment will include demos to illustrate the full capabilities of FME in AI-driven processes.
Custom AI Models: Discover how to leverage FME to build personalized AI models using your data. Whether it’s populating a model with local data for added security or integrating public AI tools, find out how FME facilitates a versatile and secure approach to AI.
We’ll wrap up with a live Q&A session where you can engage with our experts on your specific use cases, and learn more about optimizing your data workflows with AI.
This webinar is ideal for professionals seeking to harness the power of AI within their data management systems while ensuring high levels of customization and security. Whether you're a novice or an expert, gain actionable insights and strategies to elevate your data processes. Join us to see how FME and AI can revolutionize how you work with data!
AppSec PNW: Android and iOS Application Security with MobSFAjin Abraham
Mobile Security Framework - MobSF is a free and open source automated mobile application security testing environment designed to help security engineers, researchers, developers, and penetration testers to identify security vulnerabilities, malicious behaviours and privacy concerns in mobile applications using static and dynamic analysis. It supports all the popular mobile application binaries and source code formats built for Android and iOS devices. In addition to automated security assessment, it also offers an interactive testing environment to build and execute scenario based test/fuzz cases against the application.
This talk covers:
Using MobSF for static analysis of mobile applications.
Interactive dynamic security assessment of Android and iOS applications.
Solving Mobile app CTF challenges.
Reverse engineering and runtime analysis of Mobile malware.
How to shift left and integrate MobSF/mobsfscan SAST and DAST in your build pipeline.
HCL Notes and Domino License Cost Reduction in the World of DLAUpanagenda
Webinar Recording: https://www.panagenda.com/webinars/hcl-notes-and-domino-license-cost-reduction-in-the-world-of-dlau/
The introduction of DLAU and the CCB & CCX licensing model caused quite a stir in the HCL community. As a Notes and Domino customer, you may have faced challenges with unexpected user counts and license costs. You probably have questions on how this new licensing approach works and how to benefit from it. Most importantly, you likely have budget constraints and want to save money where possible. Don’t worry, we can help with all of this!
We’ll show you how to fix common misconfigurations that cause higher-than-expected user counts, and how to identify accounts which you can deactivate to save money. There are also frequent patterns that can cause unnecessary cost, like using a person document instead of a mail-in for shared mailboxes. We’ll provide examples and solutions for those as well. And naturally we’ll explain the new licensing model.
Join HCL Ambassador Marc Thomas in this webinar with a special guest appearance from Franz Walder. It will give you the tools and know-how to stay on top of what is going on with Domino licensing. You will be able lower your cost through an optimized configuration and keep it low going forward.
These topics will be covered
- Reducing license cost by finding and fixing misconfigurations and superfluous accounts
- How do CCB and CCX licenses really work?
- Understanding the DLAU tool and how to best utilize it
- Tips for common problem areas, like team mailboxes, functional/test users, etc
- Practical examples and best practices to implement right away
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3. What we’ll cover
• Simon & Schuster, a Trade publisher
• The problem with the cover workflow
• The solution, “Cover Automation.” We’re
going to explore how MarkLogic Server
together with InDesign’s XML capabilities
help us make this happen.
• Where it works, where it doesn’t. Where it
might work in the future.
3
Point 3 is of course the meat of this presentation.
4. Simon & Schuster
Trade Book Publisher
4
4
Fiction, non-fiction, audio books, Childrenʼs books, ebooks
Roughly 2000 titles/year
In business since 1924
5. Trade Publishing
• Finance: venture capital for authors
• Content creation
• Prepare content for publication
• Manufacturing
• Distribution
• Marketing
• Sales
5
5
What it means to be a trade book publisher. We pay authors to write books--venture capitalist.
We donʼt create our own content; thatʼs for the authors to do. We do prepare content for
publication: copyedit, and design, create marketing material--and a book cover these days is
marketing, like packaging for any product. We arrange for manufacturing. We distribute, market
and sell books.
6. Technology
• .NET development environment
• SQL Server on the back end
• MarkLogic for content management
6
In terms of technology, the infrastructure is mostly Microsoft, with a .NET development
environment. We use SQL Server for our databases, including business-critical systems. And
of course Mark Logic for content management.
So Why MarkLogic?
7. Digital Warehouse
• Scanning of 15,000 books
• Printable, searchable PDF; XML; OEBPS
• Rights database
• Scan contracts
• Enter rights information into a database
• Data Distribution
• XML, binaries
7
Six years ago or more: Future-proof content. >15,000 titles. POD PDF (search), OEBPS, XML.
80 years: >15,000 titles. Chosen for marketability & rights. => scan author contracts &
create rights database.
ML Server to help w/ distro of content & metadata--in XML, multiple destinations, unique
req’s
First implementation: store scanned OCR’d contracts
8. Digital Warehouse
TMM / Product
Database THE INTERNET
DATA
Distribution
Platforms
Chuckwalla
Retailers
DAM
Search
Engines
MarkLogic
Server
XML
8
Now our Syndication Server, as we call it, is part of a 3-pronged approach: structured data
(SQL Server); binary data (DAM); XML data (MarkLogic Server). Now book XML is used not just
for future-proofing, but also for search and for extracting sample chapters.
9. Key to Online Marketing:
Search
9
Why search is important, and not just for books. 19% of all online retail is done through
Amazon.com.
Completeness and quality of information gets top hits. This is a 10-year-old book, still the
top hit for this topic because of completeness, quality of info
10. Current ML “Servers”
• Contracts (Executed: Scanned, OCR’d)
• Syndication
• Cover Automation
• Content Enrichment (soon)
10
I talked about three uses to which we’ve put Mark Logic at S&S, and later I’ll discuss a fourth
one which will be coming on line soon, along with other plans we have for the technology
11. Cover Automation
11
11
Let’s turn back to the main topic of this talk. Mentioned before: Not STM, not Educational. On
the XML FIRST value graph, down near zero. But here I found a compelling case for creating
an XML-based publishing system.
12. 12
12
Here is the jacket for a pretty successful hardcover book, Sing You Home by Jodi Picoult. Letʼs look at
the problems involved in developing book covers like this one.
File is headed for manufacturing.
Book covers in todayʼs marketplace: Marketing—packaging, the representation to the world of that
product. (A couple of slides ago, images representing the products that S&S publishes. You probably
didnʼt even give it a thought that these were pictures of book covers. “Placeholder image” =>10%
bump in pre-publication sales.
Just the right look, and just the right words.
One impetus to developing the system: print = online. Another revolves around two issues . . . <click>
14. 14
14
One problem facing our designers is that for a publisher the size of Simon & Schuster, the
books come in a lot of different sizes, various formats, and from various imprints.
Imprints are profit units each of which has a slightly different outlook on the world, and likely to
be run by someone with a healthy ego and strong opinions, resulting in each having a slightly
different layout. All these different layouts and sizes poses a problem for designers and for the
workflow--getting clear, definitive and accurate information to the designers about what theyʼre
supposed to create.
16. EMAILS
WORD FILES ON A FILE SERVER
PRINTED OR WRITTEN NOTES
16
16
Added to this was the fact that information about what is supposed to go on the cover was
coming from multiple and sometimes contradictory inputs—emails, word files that were
dropped in one or another folder on a file server, or printed or even written notes. Also, these
werenʼt coming to the designer in any particular order or even following a schedule. Editors
with clout left off entire sections of copy until the last minute.
Youʼre going to hear me use the term “copy” here, which comes from the advertising and
publishing industries. It means “text.”
17. The Solution
• Definitive, authoritative information about
cover format and size
• A stable, controlled set of cover templates
• A single source for cover copy
• Digital delivery of copy to Design
17
<click>The thing is, we have all the pertinent format information about book covers in our
production database. I figured we should use it.
<click>To help avoid confusion, I also got buy-in from the art directors for them to develop a
definitive, concise library of templates and, though it might not seem important, a vocabulary
of terms. <click>We also have a system for editors to write descriptive copy about books for
internal use, the tipsheet system. So theyʼre used to writing copy in a web-based system.
Writing cover copy in a related system isnʼt that much of a stretch.
18. Cover Workflow
Acquisition Editor or
Editor Marketing Copywriter Review: Designers Designers
Tipsheet Specifications Cover Copy Finished Copy White Layout Finished Layout
18
What we established with the aid of Cover Automation is a clear workflow for book covers,
from the creation of cover copy through to the design of the cover itself. This is a somewhat
simplified view. 1. Acquisition Editor writes his or her Tipsheet. 2. Once Editorial and Marketing
agree on a format for the book and some initial specifications (format, size, approximate
length) this information is shared with Production. 3a. The Editor or sometimes a Copywriter
writes the cover copy, usually based on what was written for the Tipsheet. 3b. Production
finalizes the specifications. 4. Cover copy review and revision process, digitally. 5. Cover
Automation system combines the finished copy, specʼs, metadata to create White Layout
19. The Cover and its Features
BACK FLAP BACK COVER SPINE FRONT COVER FRONT FLAP
AUTHOR
QUOTES QUOTE
PHOTO
AUTHOR
PRICES
READING LINE
DESCRIPTION
SUBTITLE
AUTHOR BIO TITLE
“ALSO” LINE
CREDITS READING LINE
ISBN & PRICES
19
19
We have a vocabulary for describing the elements of a cover, and itʼs got sections that we
have names for, but you canʼt say that covers are really structured. The elements appear in
different places, in a different order; not all covers have all elements. Still, we can use the
information we have to our advantage, especially because we have a tool like Mark Logic to
work with.
20. The Cover Editor
20
20
Here is the Cover Editor. Generated by our product database, Title Management. The Cover
Editor provides keys to solving the problem. <click> Important metadata: type (hardcover, so a
dust jacket) and size of the cover.
The Cover Editor is also the single source for cover copy: It allows Editorial to write and edit
the copy for the various sections of a cover. <click> It allows them to place items in the order
they want them to appear in (although here the authorʼs name isnʼt on the top of the front
cover, where it should be). Of course it also allows them to add elements, such as praise
quotes.
21. 21
21
Letʼs scroll down and take a closer look at the bookʼs description, and follow that through. The
Cover Editor is a pretty full-featured program. It It allows for basic formatting--bold and
italics--and keeps track of all text changes and records when they happened and who worked
on it. I noticed that Sarah Branham added most of the elements to this cover, and that the
copyeditor Carole Schwindeller worked on it as well.
The right-hand column is for notes
22. 22
22
The system also provides routing of the cover copy through various departments. When the user <click> “sends” the cover
copy to someone, the system creates an email that identifies the sender. They can write a message to the recipient, and this
email contains a link to this Web page.
Once all the approvals are received, Editorial sends the cover copy to the designer. <click> She clicks the Build Cover button.
She then chooses <click> the imprint, format and size, and tells the system to build a cover for her. We debated creating the
cover automatically because the system has all that information, but the art directors felt that there enough departures from
the standards involved that they were more comfortable having the designers go through this step and choose manually.
23. The White Layout
23
23
The result that is downloaded to the designerʼs desk is what I call the White Layout. <click>
Here you can see the Description that we have been following.
Letʼs take a look at what is happening behind the scenes.
24. 24
24
Behind the layout--and what the designer doesnʼt see--is an XML structure. Hereʼs the
Description again <click>, with its corresponding element in the structure. So how do we get to
this point?
25. Cover Editor/SQL Server: Cover Copy in XML Template in IDML
The “Replacement Engine”
“White Layout”
25
25
We took a look at the Cover Editor, which contains the metadata and the cover copy. The SQL database which provides the
Cover Editor generates an XML version of the data to go on the cover.
Another key element is the template, which weʼll examine in a moment. The InDesign template corresponding to the format
and size of the book is exported to a variety of XML called IDML, which the MarkLogic server can read, and the server
combines the two to create the White Layout. Weʼve all heard about Babbageʼs Difference Engine. What we have here is a
Replacement Engine. Replacement is a key concept to understanding how this system works.
Letʼs take a look at that process step-by-step.
26. The Template (indd)
26
26
Here it is in Indesign format. Once the designer has the layout set, we identify the elements that are to be populated with
cover copy, using InDesignʼs capability to introduce structure into their layouts. Notice that this one contains 14 structural
elements. So in addition to the cover copy that Editorial writes, it allows us to populate items like prices and ISBN, and what
you might call “boilerplate,” like the line that tells buyers that the book is also available as an ebook or an audio. This is a great
timesaver, and eliminates the possibility of of a lot of errors, as it used to be up to the designers (notoriously bad typists) to
type in the ISBN, prices, and tag lines like “Also available as and ebook.”
I want to bring to your attention the element that is on the flap. It is a placeholder frame <click>. There is only one element
here, yet, as weʼll see, there will be more than one element that is to be placed in the white layout here. We could never
predict how many elements there might be in a section, and weʼll discuss how we solved that particular problem a little later
on.
27. The Template (idml)
27
27
Once the template is set, it is saved in idml format. IDML is an XML format, consisting of XML files describing each aspect and
piece in the layout, then placed in a ZIP wrapper, similar to what Microsoft is doing with its Office documents. What is
important about the fact that Adobe has done this, is that the IDML format is both complete and native. That is key for us,
because it allows us to edit or even create InDesign documents through XML.
Here is the template opened in an XML editor. Notice all the folders listed down the left side of the window.<click>
28. The Template (idml)
28
28
Here Iʼve opened the “Stories” folder, and chosen one of the “Stories.” Iʼve highlighted the tag
that identifies this Story as the “placeholder” frame for copy that is to be placed on the flap
<click>. A “placeholder” frame is the first in a column of one or more frames in that Section.
29. Cover-Info
29
29
The other key building block is the XML output by the SQL database. We refer to it as “cover-info.” Cover-info XML is not valid,
but it is well-formed and Mark Logic is perfectly fine with it. It is a collection of the elements that are to appear on the cover,
both those that were written by Editorial and data generated from the product database.
<click> We can see the first section, frontcover, and the first three and part of a fourth element, identified as TextFrames: the
TITLE, SUBTITLE, AUTHOR, and parts of the HEADLINE, like “#1 New York Times bestselling author” The words “New York
Times” are in a SPAN identified as “emphasis.”
30. 30
30
If we scroll down through this file, we come to the Description, which we were following. Itʼs part of the Section called “flap.”
There is a quote from Stephen King followed by the Description we were looking at before. So, as I pointed out before, here
are two text frames that are to be positioned in the same section.
Hereʼs how we solve that problem: Notice the InDesign-specific information. There is an argument in the section tag called y-
offset. <click> This indicates that each TextFrame for that section is to start 54 points--or 3/4 inch--below the previous one.
Also notice that the ParagraphStyle argument. It corresponds with InDesign paragraph styles, and the CharacterStyle
corresponds with character styles set up in the template.
Where Mark Logic comes into the equation, as you might have guessed, is putting these two XML streams--the IDML of the
template and the XML of the cover-info--together to generate the White Layout.
31. 31
31
Letʼs look behind the scenes at what happens when the Designer pushes the “Generate Layout” and then “Start” buttons. In
this administratorʼs view we can see the templates weʼve saved in IDML format. These correspond to the choices made by the
designer in terms of division, format and size. Clicking on one of these listings we can see the ISBNs which were processed
with that template.<click> Clicking on that displays the date and time that it was processed, along with a string that shows us
what is happening: <click> At the bottom of the browser we see a string that calls a module called Controller, an XQuery, and
passes to it two arguments, the ISBN and the template.
32. 32
32
Iʼm not going to go through the Xqueries line by line. Iʼm not an Xquery expert by any stretch,
but that would take us the better part of a month to do.
33. 33
33
Suffice to say that Controller does what its name implies. It runs the show. The heavy lifting is
done by another Xquery, lib-ss. Thatʼs where “run-layout” resides.
34. 34
34
Lib-ss is 14 screens long, but the operative phrase appears in this snippet: “replace all the
replaceable content.” A few slides back we looked at the XML contained in one of the IDML
templates. It has placeholder-type tags, and values for them. We also looked at the cover-info
XML delivered by the SQL database. It has tags in it called placeholder-type, pageitem type,
and pageitem-number.
35. 35
35
The cover-info is placed into a corresponding folder in one part of the MarkLogic system <click>. What lib-ss and its minions
do is open the cover-info XML and for each XML element <click> it looks into the content folder <click> for the relevant
JobTicket and finds the Story with the relevant placeholder-type <click>--the “flap” in our case. It then replaces the contents of
that story with the contents from cover-info <click>. It stores the result in the staging folder <click>.
If there is more than one pageitem for that placeholder-type--the Description in “flap” in our case--it generates another Story,
identical in type and size, and drops it in, 3/4” lower on the layout.
Once it is through processing the contents of cover-info, it then combines--in memory--the Stories that are in Staging with the
ones in the template, replacing whatever stories there have the same ID.
36. 36
36
It ZIPs this collection of files into an IDML, which the user downloads. Here is the IDML,
opened in an XML editor, with the first Story of the flap displayed. If you look closely enough,
<click> youʼll see that the local formatting is preserved from the Cover Editor.
37. 37
37
Here is the Description that we were following. <click>It is tagged as item-content, and a
description.
38. 38
38
So the IDML that is delivered to the user--what I call the “white layout”--contains a wealth of
structural information. We donʼt turn on the structure view for the user, of course.
39. 39
39
The designer then proceeds to add graphics, photos, color, and to set the type to create the
finished layout.
40. 40
40
The result still contains the structure of the template even at this stage. Here the book description is highlighted. The system is
actually designed so that if this layout is saved as an IDML, it can be submitted to the system and the corresponding fields we
saw in the Cover Editor could be updated with any changes made to the text in the InDesign file. The idea was that this
finished cover would contain the final word on what editors, publishers and marketing types wanted to say about the book.
However, we uncovered two flaws in our logic.
41. CoverTextAsArt
41
41
For one thing, many covers, like this one, have artwork instead of text. For Children's, this meant that our approach of having
cover copy delivered from a database wasn't of much use. There wasn't much text on their covers anyway. But designers in
the Adult Division wanted to be able to turn some of the text into art, too. And they were apt to break up or combine frames of
text, resulting in the IDML Stories getting out of synch.
More importantly, waiting for the final, approved text on the cover has become too much of a luxury. While at the time we
began this project, total, letter-perfect correspondence between the cover and online copy was mandatory. Online marketing
demands that this information be timely. That means it must be out before the cover is even close to being ready for the
printer. Weʼre getting to the point that what goes out o the Net does not have to batch the cover character for character.
42. Future Directions
“Catalog Automation”
42
We are thinking of other applications for this technology, though. Here is the page from our
HTML-based digital catalog for Sing You Home, but weʼre exploring the idea of using a similar
approach to building print catalogs, as well.
43. Future Directions
Content Enrichment
43
One of the reasons I pushed so hard for ML, besides XML manipulation, was search.
Our Digital Group, with the help of MarkLogic Professional Services and some third-party
tools, has built a content enrichment and search tool which will be going live shortly. Here
I’ve typed in the phrase “civil rights.” It has turned up a list of relevant titles and extracted
appropriate sections of text. The tool also allows the user to drill down into the title. At a
demonstration of the tool, someone typed in Quaddafi and turned up a book from years ago,
that everyone had forgotten about, written by a personal friend of his. I think this will
become a valuable tool, and it shows why saving content in XML is important, even though
we don’t have an XML-based workflow.
44. Conclusion
• What it means to be a Trade publisher
• The problem: haphazard copy, unclear
format information
• How we use MarkLogic Server to create
InDesign layouts
• Limitations of this approach.
• Where it might work in the future.
44
So weʼve covered (read) <click> <click> <click> <click> <click>
45. Acknowledgements
I would just like to acknowledge the
contributions of Frank Rubino and Jason
Myatt of MarkLogic. Not only did they build
the MarkLogic part of Cover Automation,
but help me with this presentation.
45
Frank Rubino & Jason Myatt
46. Thank You—Questions?
Steve Kotrch
Director of Publishing Technology
steve.kotrch@simonandschuster.com
Twitter: steveko
Simon & Schuster
46
46
Editor's Notes
\n
\n
Point 3 is of course the meat of this presentation.\n
What it means to be a trade book publisher. We pay authors to write books--venture capitalist. We don&#x2019;t create our own content; that&#x2019;s for the authors to do. We do prepare content for publication: copyedit, and design, create marketing material--and a book cover these days is marketing, like packaging for any product. We arrange for manufacturing. We distribute, market and sell books.\n\n
In terms of technology, the infrastructure is mostly Microsoft, with a .NET development environment. We use SQL Server for our databases, including business-critical systems. And of course Mark Logic for content management.\nSo Why MarkLogic?\n
XML important: Six or more years ago, tasked to identify a way to future-proof our content. We were embarking on a project that involved digitizing thousands of books for which we had no files, the Digital Warehouse project. Not to be confused with a Data Warehouse. Three-pronged approach: structured data (SQL Server); binary data (DAM); XML data (MarkLogic Server). We knew we would have to transform the content into various forms, so MarkLogic. Now book XML is used not just for future-proofing, but also for search and for extracting sample chapters.\n
Why search is important. 19% of all online retail is done through Amazon.com.\nEven having a &#x201C;placeholder image&#x201D; for a book cover gets us a 10% bump in pre-publication sales.\n
\n
\n
Here is the jacket for a pretty successful hardcover book. Let&#x2019;s look at the problems involved in developing book covers like this one. \nLet me take a moment to talk about book covers in today&#x2019;s marketplace. They are extremely important to the marketing of our products. They act as packaging, but even more than that they are the representation to the world of that product. A couple of slides ago you saw a bunch of images representing the products that S&S publishes. You probably didn&#x2019;t even give it a thought that these were pictures of book covers. As a result, a lot of effort goes into getting just the right look, and just the right words on a cover. As a result they go through many rounds of approvals and revisions before they&#x2019;re considered ready to be printed.\nOne impetus to developing the system I&#x2019;m about to describe to you is the demand on the part of Sales and Marketing to have exactly the words we use on the cover of a book represent it online. Another revolves around two issues . . . <click>\n
One problem facing our designers is that for a publisher the size of Simon & Schuster, the books come in a lot of different sizes, various formats, and from various imprints. Imprints are profit units each of which has a slightly different outlook on the world, and likely to be run by someone with a healthy ego and strong opinions, resulting in each having a slightly different layout. All these different layouts and sizes poses a problem for designers and for the workflow--getting clear, definitive and accurate information to the designers about what they&#x2019;re supposed to create.\nAdded to this was the fact that information about what is supposed to go on the cover was coming from multiple and sometimes contradictory inputs&#x2014;emails, word files that were dropped in one or another folder on a file server, or printed or even written notes. Also, these weren&#x2019;t coming to the designer in any particular order or even following a schedule. Editors with clout left off entire sections of copy until the last minute.\nYou&#x2019;re going to hear me use the term &#x201C;copy&#x201D; here, which comes from the advertising and publishing industries. It means &#x201C;text.&#x201D; \n
<click>The thing is, we have all the pertinent format information about book covers in our production database. That&#x2019;s one of the SQL databases I alluded to earlier. I figured we should use it. \n<click>To help avoid confusion, I also got buy-in from the art directors for them to develop a definitive, concise library of templates and, though it might not seem important, a vocabulary of terms by which to call the various sizes and formats (jacket, cover, trade paper, French flap, step-back and so on). <click>We also have a system for editors to write descriptive copy about books for internal use, the tipsheet system. So they&#x2019;re used to writing copy in a web-based system. Writing cover copy in a related system isn&#x2019;t that much of a stretch.\n
What we established with the aid of Cover Automation is a clear workflow for book covers, from the creation of cover copy through to the design of the cover itself. This is a somewhat simplified view. 1. Acquisition Editor writes his or her Tipsheet. 2. Once Editorial and Marketing agree on a format for the book and some initial specifications (format, size, approximate length) this information is shared with Production. 3a. The Editor or sometimes a Copywriter writes the cover copy, usually based on what was written for the Tipsheet. 3b. Production finalizes the specifications. 4. Cover copy review and revision process, digitally. 5. Cover Automation system combines the finished copy, spec&#x2019;s, metadata to create White Layout\n
We have a vocabulary for describing the elements of a cover, and it&#x2019;s got sections that we have names for, but you can&#x2019;t say that covers are really structured. The elements appear in different places, in a different order; not all covers have all elements. Still, we can use the information we have to our advantage, especially because we have a tool like Mark Logic to work with.\n
Here is the Cover Editor. It&#x2019;s a Web page generated out of our product database, Title Management. The Cover Editor provides keys to solving the problem. <click> Notice that it contains important metadata, especially the definitive type (hardcover, so a dust jacket) and size of the cover. Again, this is taken from the database that we use to actually order manufacturing, so it has to be dead accurate.\nThe Cover Editor is also the single source for cover copy: It allows Editorial to write and edit the copy for the various sections of a cover. <click> It allows them to place items in the order they want them to appear in (although here the author&#x2019;s name isn&#x2019;t on the top of the front cover, where it should be). Of course it also allows them to add elements, such as praise quotes.\n
Let&#x2019;s scroll down the Web page and take a closer look at the book&#x2019;s description, and follow that through. The Cover Editor is a pretty full-featured program. It It allows for basic formatting--bold and italics--and keeps track of all text changes and records when they happened and who worked on it. I noticed that Sarah Branham added most of the elements to this cover, and that the copyeditor Carole Schwindeller worked on it as well.\nThe right-hand column is for notes--italicize this, make that prominent, are you sure you want to use this adjective three times in the same paragraph? For this title there didn&#x2019;t seem to be any need for that.\n\n
The system also provides routing of the cover copy through various departments. When the user <click> &#x201C;sends&#x201D; the cover copy to someone, the system creates an email that identifies the sender. They can write a message to the recipient, and this email contains a link to this Web page. \nOnce all the approvals are received, Editorial sends the cover copy to the designer. <click> She clicks the Build Cover button. \nShe then chooses <click> the imprint, format and size, and tells the system to build a cover for her. We debated creating the cover automatically because the system has all that information, but the art directors felt that there enough departures from the standards involved that they were more comfortable having the designers go through this step and choose manually.\n
The result that is downloaded to the designer&#x2019;s desk is what I call the White Layout. <click> Here you can see the Description that we have been following. \nLet&#x2019;s take a look at what is happening behind the scenes.\n
Behind the layout--and what the designer doesn&#x2019;t see--is an XML structure. Here&#x2019;s the Description again <click>, with its corresponding element in the structure. So how do we get to this point? \n
We took a look at the Cover Editor, which contains the metadata and the cover copy. The SQL database which provides the Cover Editor generates an XML version of the data to go on the cover. \nAnother key element is the template, which we&#x2019;ll examine in a moment. The template corresponding to the format and size of the book is exported to a version of XML which the MarkLogic server can read, and the server combines the two to create the White Layout. We&#x2019;ve all heard about Babbage&#x2019;s Difference Engine. What we have here is a Replacement Engine. Replacement is a key concept to understanding how this system works.\nLet&#x2019;s take a look at that process step-by-step.\n
We took a look at the Cover Editor, which contains the metadata and the cover copy. The SQL database which provides the Cover Editor generates an XML version of the data to go on the cover. \nAnother key element is the template, which we&#x2019;ll examine in a moment. The template corresponding to the format and size of the book is exported to a version of XML which the MarkLogic server can read, and the server combines the two to create the White Layout. We&#x2019;ve all heard about Babbage&#x2019;s Difference Engine. What we have here is a Replacement Engine. Replacement is a key concept to understanding how this system works.\nLet&#x2019;s take a look at that process step-by-step.\n
We took a look at the Cover Editor, which contains the metadata and the cover copy. The SQL database which provides the Cover Editor generates an XML version of the data to go on the cover. \nAnother key element is the template, which we&#x2019;ll examine in a moment. The template corresponding to the format and size of the book is exported to a version of XML which the MarkLogic server can read, and the server combines the two to create the White Layout. We&#x2019;ve all heard about Babbage&#x2019;s Difference Engine. What we have here is a Replacement Engine. Replacement is a key concept to understanding how this system works.\nLet&#x2019;s take a look at that process step-by-step.\n
We took a look at the Cover Editor, which contains the metadata and the cover copy. The SQL database which provides the Cover Editor generates an XML version of the data to go on the cover. \nAnother key element is the template, which we&#x2019;ll examine in a moment. The template corresponding to the format and size of the book is exported to a version of XML which the MarkLogic server can read, and the server combines the two to create the White Layout. We&#x2019;ve all heard about Babbage&#x2019;s Difference Engine. What we have here is a Replacement Engine. Replacement is a key concept to understanding how this system works.\nLet&#x2019;s take a look at that process step-by-step.\n
Here it is in Indesign format. Once the designer has the layout set, we identify the elements that are to be populated with cover copy, using InDesign&#x2019;s capability to introduce structure into their layouts. Notice that this one contains 14 structural elements. So in addition to the cover copy that Editorial writes, it allows us to populate items like prices and ISBN, and what you might call &#x201C;boilerplate,&#x201D; like the line that tells buyers that the book is also available as an ebook or an audio. This is a great timesaver, and eliminates the possibility of of a lot of errors, as it used to be up to the designers (notoriously bad typists) to type in the ISBN, prices, and tag lines like &#x201C;Also available as and ebook.&#x201D;\nI want to bring to your attention that there is just one placeholder frame in the flap section <click>. Yet, as we&#x2019;ll see, there will be more than one element that is to be placed in the flap. We could never predict how many elements there might be in a section, and we&#x2019;ll discuss how we solved that particular problem a little later on.\n
Once the template is set, it is saved in idml format. IDML is an XML format, consisting of XML files describing each aspect and piece in the layout, then placed in a ZIP wrapper, similar to what Microsoft is doing with its Office documents. What is important about the fact that Adobe has done this, is that the IDML format is both complete and native. That is key for us, because it allows us to edit or even create InDesign documents through XML.\nHere is the template opened in an XML editor. Notice all the folders listed down the left side of the window.\n
Here I&#x2019;ve opened the &#x201C;Stories&#x201D; folder, and chosen one of the &#x201C;Stories.&#x201D; I&#x2019;ve highlighted the tag that identifies this Story as the &#x201C;placeholder&#x201D; frame for copy that is to be placed on the flap <click>. A &#x201C;placeholder&#x201D; frame is the first in a column of one or more frames in that Section. \n
The other key building block is the XML output by the SQL database. We refer to it as &#x201C;cover-info.&#x201D; Cover-info XML is not valid, but it is well-formed and Mark Logic is perfectly fine with it. It is a collection of the elements that are to appear on the cover, both those that were written by Editorial and data generated from the product database.\nWe can see the first section, frontcover, and the first three and part of a fourth element, identified as TextFrames: the TITLE, SUBTITLE, AUTHOR, and part of the HEADLINE, &#x201C;#1 New York Times bestselling author&#x201D; The words &#x201C;New York Times&#x201D; are in a SPAN identified as &#x201C;emphasis.&#x201D;\n
If we scroll down through this file, we come to the Description, which we were following. It&#x2019;s part of the Section called &#x201C;flap.&#x201D; There is a quote from Stephen King followed by the Description we were looking at before. So, as I pointed out before, here are two text frames that are to be positioned in the same section.\nHere&#x2019;s how we solve that problem: Notice the InDesign-specific information. There is an argument in the section tag called y-offset. This indicates that each TextFrame for that section is to start 54 points--or 3/4 inch--below the previous one. \nAlso notice that the ParagraphStyle argument. It corresponds with InDesign paragraph styles, and the CharacterStyle corresponds with character styles set up in the template.\nWhere Mark Logic comes into the equation, as you might have guessed, is putting these two XML streams--the IDML of the template and the XML of the cover-info--together to generate the White Layout.\n
Let&#x2019;s look behind the scenes at what happens when the Designer pushes the &#x201C;Generate Layout&#x201D; and then &#x201C;Start&#x201D; buttons. In this administrator&#x2019;s view we can see the templates we&#x2019;ve saved in IDML format. These correspond to the choices made by the designer in terms of division, format and size. Clicking on one of these listings we can see the ISBNs which were processed with that template.<click> Clicking on that displays the date and time that it was processed, along with a string that shows us what is happening: <click> At the bottom of the browser we see a string that calls a module called Controller, an XQuery, and passes to it two arguments, the ISBN and the &#x201C;Job Ticket&#x201D; that corresponds to the template.\n
Let&#x2019;s look behind the scenes at what happens when the Designer pushes the &#x201C;Generate Layout&#x201D; and then &#x201C;Start&#x201D; buttons. In this administrator&#x2019;s view we can see the templates we&#x2019;ve saved in IDML format. These correspond to the choices made by the designer in terms of division, format and size. Clicking on one of these listings we can see the ISBNs which were processed with that template.<click> Clicking on that displays the date and time that it was processed, along with a string that shows us what is happening: <click> At the bottom of the browser we see a string that calls a module called Controller, an XQuery, and passes to it two arguments, the ISBN and the &#x201C;Job Ticket&#x201D; that corresponds to the template.\n
Let&#x2019;s look behind the scenes at what happens when the Designer pushes the &#x201C;Generate Layout&#x201D; and then &#x201C;Start&#x201D; buttons. In this administrator&#x2019;s view we can see the templates we&#x2019;ve saved in IDML format. These correspond to the choices made by the designer in terms of division, format and size. Clicking on one of these listings we can see the ISBNs which were processed with that template.<click> Clicking on that displays the date and time that it was processed, along with a string that shows us what is happening: <click> At the bottom of the browser we see a string that calls a module called Controller, an XQuery, and passes to it two arguments, the ISBN and the &#x201C;Job Ticket&#x201D; that corresponds to the template.\n
Let&#x2019;s look behind the scenes at what happens when the Designer pushes the &#x201C;Generate Layout&#x201D; and then &#x201C;Start&#x201D; buttons. In this administrator&#x2019;s view we can see the templates we&#x2019;ve saved in IDML format. These correspond to the choices made by the designer in terms of division, format and size. Clicking on one of these listings we can see the ISBNs which were processed with that template.<click> Clicking on that displays the date and time that it was processed, along with a string that shows us what is happening: <click> At the bottom of the browser we see a string that calls a module called Controller, an XQuery, and passes to it two arguments, the ISBN and the &#x201C;Job Ticket&#x201D; that corresponds to the template.\n
I&#x2019;m not going to go through the Xqueries line by line. I&#x2019;m not an Xquery expert by any stretch, but that would take us the better part of a month to do. \n
Suffice to say that Controller does what its name implies. It runs the show. The heavy lifting is done by another Xquery, lib-ss. That&#x2019;s where &#x201C;run-layout&#x201D; resides.\n
Lib-ss is 14 screens long, but the operative phrase appears in this snippet: &#x201C;replace all the replaceable content.&#x201D; A few slides back we looked at the XML contained in one of the IDML templates. It has placeholder-type tags, and values for them. We also looked at the cover-info XML delivered by the SQL database. It has tags in it called placeholder-type, pageitem type, and pageitem-number.\n
The cover-info is placed into a corresponding folder in one part of the MarkLogic system <click>. What lib-ss and its minions do is open the cover-info XML and for each XML element <click> it looks into the content folder <click> for the relevant JobTicket and finds the Story with the relevant placeholder-type <click>--the &#x201C;flap&#x201D; in our case. It then replaces the contents of that story with the contents from cover-info <click>. It stores the result in the staging folder <click>.\nIf there is more than one pageitem for that placeholder-type--the Description in &#x201C;flap&#x201D; in our case--it generates another Story, identical in type and size, and drops it in, 3/4&#x201D; lower on the layout. \nOnce it is through processing the contents of cover-info, it then combines--in memory--the Stories that are in Staging with the ones in the Job Ticket, replacing whatever stories there have the same ID. \n
It ZIPs this collection of files into an IDML, which the user downloads. Here is the IDML, opened in an XML editor, with the first Story of the flap displayed. If you look closely enough, <click> you&#x2019;ll see that the local formatting is preserved from the Cover Editor.\n
Here is the Description that we were following. <click>It is tagged as item-content, and a description.\n
So the IDML that is delivered to the user--what I call the &#x201C;white layout&#x201D;--contains a wealth of structural information. We don&#x2019;t turn on the structure view for the user, of course.\n
The designer then proceeds to add graphics, photos, color, and to set the type to create the finished layout.\n
The result still contains the structure of the template even at this stage. Here the book description is highlighted. The system is actually designed so that if this layout is saved as an IDML, it can be submitted to the system and the corresponding fields we saw in the Cover Editor could be updated with any changes made to the text in the InDesign file. The idea was that this finished cover would contain the final word on what editors, publishers and marketing types wanted to say about the book.\nHowever, we uncovered two flaws in our logic.\n
For one thing, many covers, like this one, have artwork instead of text. For Children's, this meant that our approach of having cover copy delivered from a database wasn't of much use. There wasn't much text on their covers anyway. But designers in the Adult Division wanted to be able to turn some of the text into art, too. And they were apt to break up or combine frames of text, resulting in the IDML Stories getting out of synch.\nMore importantly, waiting for the final, approved text on the cover has become too much of a luxury. While at the time we began this project, total, letter-perfect correspondence between the cover and online copy was mandatory. Online marketing demands that this information be timely. That means it must be out before the cover is even close to being ready for the printer. We&#x2019;re getting to the point that what goes out o the Net does not have to batch the cover character for character.\n
We are thinking of other applications for this technology, though. Here is the page from our HTML-based digital catalog for Sing You Home, but we&#x2019;re exploring the idea of using a similar approach to building print catalogs, as well.\n
Our Digital Group, with the help of MarkLogic Professional Services and some third-party tools, has built a content enrichment and search tool which will be going live shortly. Here I&#x2019;ve typed in the phrase &#x201C;civil rights.&#x201D; It has turned up a list of relevant titles and extracted appropriate sections of text. The tool also allows the user to drill down into the title. At a demonstration of the tool, someone typed in Quaddafi and turned up a book from years ago, that everyone had forgotten about, written by a personal friend of his. I think this will become a valuable tool, and it shows why saving content in XML is important, even though we don&#x2019;t have an XML-based workflow.\n
So we&#x2019;ve covered (read) <click> <click> <click> <click> <click>\n
So we&#x2019;ve covered (read) <click> <click> <click> <click> <click>\n