XML Publishing – Practical Tools for Production

[The Daddy]

We recently attended the XML day, hosted by X-Window on 10 Apr 08, in Reading, England.

The day was split into 2 tracks: a technical publications and a commercial publication theme. Having arrived nice and early, we were greeted by Rick, Mike and Matt from X-Window who were hosting the day, then soon started networking as more delegates arrived. There was a real mix of diciplines from across the UK, with people from defence or defence contractors, engineering fields, libraries and journals as well as advertising and commercial services industries.

Within the 2 tracks, the day was broken down to look at, broadly, inputting and creating data, controlling and managing data, and generating output from data. Obviously the over-arching ideal was the use of XML to add value to data and simplify the creation, management and output.

I attended the technical track throughout the day and saw presentations from Ovidius, In.Vision, Lionbridge, Exegenix, EasyBrowse and Antenna House.

In brief:

Ovidius supplies a wide tool set to enable the creation and management of data with TCToolbox, a complete XML solution. It is one of the more user-friendly content management systems I've seen with a really good document structure break-down.

In.Vision has an XML editing environment based on Word. It looks and feels like Word but produces XML, taking away the fear factor many authors experience when their IT gurus start talking about XML!

Lionbridge are a translation company. It was amazing to see the potential savings that could be made on translation tasks where proper data managment was being used to avoid re-translating the same info, or where production re-works meant additional re-translations.

Exegenix supply what was possibly one of the most significant products to be discussed during the day: a conversion system that can take any legacy data from a printable source and convert it intelligently and accurately into XML. It apparently even works with scanned input, although the usual OCR limitations apply on accuracy of text conversion!

EasyBrowse was another great revalation. It is a really light-weight but proficient browser system. Through virtually a 'black-box' system, you can take just about any content and web-enable it in a fully interactive browser.

Antenna House finished the day, with a suite of output tools. Basically, they can take the XML from your repository and using XSLT, re-purpose it for any type of output - paper, web, pdf, etc.

During the breaks we had some great discussions, talking about the directions different industries are taking, looking at the problems of implementing standards and particularly of how to deal with legacy data.

It was certainly a worthwhile day and I'd like to thank Rick and the guys for hosting it. I look forward to the next one!