Frankfurt Book Fair Blog 3: Closing the Data Gap

Expert Advice

Today on our stand our experts holding office hours were Jen Shorten and Ernst Kallus.

Jen is the lead architect for our partner team and has a world of experience in publishing going back to the original Wiley digital platforms. This year at Frankfurt Jen is seeing that “publishers are starting to see themselves as data and information companies.” This is a welcome change and it “means publishers are truly looking towards the future and will open up opportunities for innovation.”

Ernst Kallus is the founder of Stratigem Partners and is advising publishers on content and data strategies. Ernst says, “The convergence of data and content is abundantly clear as the right direction.” But there is “still a gap in the pace of adoption even with advanced data tools like MarkLogic being available.” This might be the because of the larger issues facing the industry, but Ernst sees that “if they made the investment in data it would actually address many of those fundamental issues.”

Data Driven Publishing and Navigating Copyright

We started off the day visiting with the Orbis Technology team at Frankfurt US Consul General Patricia Lacina’s private residence. Hosted by Orbis technology, this discussion covered the EU Commission Digital Single Market initiatives. Susan Wilson, U.S. attaché, gave an overview of the impact of the EU initiatives and outlined how copyright directives now being reviewed by member states could have sweeping impacts to many areas of the information industry markets. Susan urged a more open and iterative process as this goes into implementation but warned that the results may be a more complicated environment for IP driven industries. Brian Ippolito, CEO of Orbis, then reviewed the critical role of flexible content management and the data around the content to get the most value from your content in these dynamic times.

Copyright Clearance Center’s (CCC) Carl Robinson took to the stage to talk about how “Better Data is Better Publishing.” Carl talked about the many kinds of data from descriptive and administrative to ‘exhaust’ data. CCC surveyed publishers and discovered that metadata was their No. 1 priority with a 4.6 out of 5 ranking for importance. But the group only gave a rank of 2 out of 5 for how capable they were with that metadata. Closing this ‘2.6’ gap is a key strategy for publishers. The first step was not to tackle ‘big data’ but instead look for the ‘correct data’ to deliver value. Building data expertise and experience is necessary for the business but is also needed to take advantage of new technology like machine learning and AI. If they can close the ‘data gap,’ publisher’s data can play a vital role in the future of the industry. The CCC survey results are available in the Ixxus Digital Transformation Journey report found here.

For more on the importance of data, see Publisher’s Weekly Show Daily article on digitization.

XML at SiteFusion

I also had a chance to get back to basics with the SiteFusion team and talk about “Three Cool Things You Can Do with your XML.” Getting really fast and flexible access to your XML, connecting it to other data and making it easy to query are just the start when you use MarkLogic, the best tool for getting the most out of your XML. I’ve uploaded the slides from my presentation here. I went back to my work with NISO STS from 2017 and you can find that talk here.

Getting Your Content in Order

Creating structured content and data is a big challenge for anyone looking to leverage and re-use their content in multiple formats and products. Today, much of content creation is still in Word and moving away from it can be a difficult process. Fonto’s mission is to make it easy for everyone to create structured and intelligent content with their FontoXML editor.

One example is the world of standards. Structure is very important and everything has to be available to re-use. Fonto’s solution for NEN, the Netherlands standards organization, moves the standards organization responsible for over 31,000 standards from managing the standards content creation process in Word to a web, XML first authoring environment. Standards development involves many people working worldwide and so the solution also needs to be usable by a broad range of users with very little training. With this move to web based, the organization expects to increase the quality and speed development.

This project is also introducing the NISO standard for standard (NISO STS). Other Fonto standards customers also use STS, and Fonto is working on enabling tool interoperability between standards bodies using STS. See this site for more on Fonto’s work with NEN.

Request a demo or catch the Fonto team here on our booth 4.2 K35!

My Turn in the Hot Seat

I’m up next as the expert on our stand tomorrow. This has been a great show so far with conversations going back to my roots in publishing and XML all the way to the modern data driven strategy that is critical for the future of publishing.

Come on by and say hi tomorrow 10-12pm on our stand. Also check out our blogs covering FBF Day 1 and Day 2!

Blogging From Frankfurt,

~Matt