Abstract

What is structured authoring?

What is XML?

The impact of structured authoring on a publishing workflow

Workflow options

Roles and responsibilities

Developing a business case for structured authoring and XML

Does your organization need structure?

Implementing a structured workflow

Summary

Developing a business case for structured authoring and XML

Not every content-creation group will benefit from structured authoring and XML. Sometimes, the expense of implementation outweighs the benefits realized, especially in smaller groups with a smaller amount of content.

There are a number of imperatives that lead to implementation of structured authoring and XML. The following are some of the most common scenarios:

• Enabling content exchange between incompatible applications
• Extracting information from databases for publication
• Reducing content duplication and reusing information
• Extracting information based on structure and metadata
• Improving formatting consistency
• Reducing author learning curve
• Improving compliance with required document structure, especially in regulated industries

Enabling content exchange

XML is platform- and vendor-neutral, which makes it an excellent choice as an intermediate format. It is quite common in a single company for two departments to standardize on different, incompatible publishing tools. As a result, the information developed in one department cannot be reused in another department without extensive manual conversion and reformatting work. This leads to “content silos,” where each department owns a separate, private set of information, often with significant amounts of content duplication (Figure 16).

Structured authoring and XML can eliminate this silo mentality without necessarily forcing either group to implement the preferred software tools of the other group. Each group authors in its preferred application, and then exports to XML for interchange. Intensive coordination is required to ensure that the structures used by each group are compatible.

To make this system work, each group must use a publishing tool that supports XML import/export (Figure 17).

Extracting information from databases for publication

XML provides a useful intermediate format for content that’s exported from a database. Most commonly, database publishing is used for parts catalogs, directories, and similar large data sets. The records are extracted from the database and marked up as XML; the XML is then processed to produce the final output (Figure 18).

Traditionally, database publishing has required customized, application-specific solutions. XML offers a generalized and significantly less expensive approach, which better separates the data generation task from the output formatting task.

Reducing content duplication and reusing information

Imposing structure results in improved consistency of content. When combined with an XML-based content repository, structure makes it easier to manage content. Once content is under control, you can search for particular chunks of information and reuse them. The alternative, in a disorganized environment, is that content is written several times. The first writer creates a piece of information. A second writer needs that same information but doesn’t know that the first writer already created it. The second writer rewrites the information. Now, there is duplicated content, which is probably inconsistent. As the two information sources are maintained and updated, they diverge further.

Minimizing the total amount of content being created and modified is one of the most powerful ways to reduce the total cost of content development. Creating what’s needed just once requires that all of the writers can locate content as necessary.

Reusing content results in decreased costs, especially as documents are updated from one version to the next. If documents are also translated, significant cost savings will be realized in that effort. The cost savings from translation alone can justify the implementation of an entire structured workflow.

Extracting information based on structure and metadata

Once information is structured and stored with metadata attached to it, it becomes much easier to search for specific information. Consider a structured environment in which each major topic has the following attributes:

• Author name
• Revision date
• Product/topic
• User level
• Platform

Based on these attributes, you could perform a search that extracts all of the topics written in the past year that are Windows specific and for administrators.

Improving formatting consistency

In a structured environment, formatting is handled automatically based on the structure. “Formatting by rule” greatly improves consistency across a document set—authors or production editors are not required to remember, for example, that in a list of bullets, the first bullet gets a special paragraph tag. Instead, the software applies these types of formatting rules -automatically.

Reducing author learning curve

Instead of learning to format documents using a specific publishing tool, writers focus on -creating and organizing content. The process of formatting information is automated, which greatly reduces the need for writers to act as their own desktop publishers. However, writers do need to learn to assign useful metadata tagging to documents.

Improving compliance with required document structure

United States government contractors, especially those who work with the military, have long been required to deliver documents using specific standards. The aerospace industry also has specific rules for documents such as aircraft maintenance manuals, and the pharmaceutical industry has rules for labeling. SGML and XML have been used heavily to enforce such -standards.

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Does your organization need structure?

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