A posting from Ron Daniel (Co-chair, PRISM Working Group) announces the public release of a 'last call' version of the PRISM metadata specification. The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) specification "is a standard for content description, interchange, and reuse in both traditional and electronic publishing contexts. PRISM defines an extensible, RDF-compliant metadata framework, a rich set of descriptive elements, and vocabularies for the values of those elements. The specification is intended to meet the needs of publishers and other organizations who produce and/or disseminate information. The PRISM specification uses XML + namespaces, RDF, and the Dublin Core namespace. It now adds a new namespace containing more detailed elements than those from the Dublin Core, and also adds namespaces for simple representation of controlled vocabularies and for a simple rights & permissions language." The working group plans to deliver Version 1.0 of the PRISM specification on April 9, 2001 in conjunction with the Seybold conference.

"The period for comments closes March 29. Version 1.0 of the specification will be released April 9, in conjunction with the Seybold conference. Given the short time between the close of comments and the initial release, the editors request your comments be submitted as early as possible."

An initial section of the specification characterizes PRISM in relationship to XML, Resource Description Framework (RDF), Dublin Core (DC), NewsML, News Industry Text Format (NITF), Information and Content Exchange (ICE), eXtensible Rights Markup Language (XrML), and XML Topic Maps.

From the specification: "The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) specification defines an XML metadata vocabulary for syndicating, aggregating, post-processing and multi-purposing magazine, news, catalog, book, and mainstream journal content. PRISM provides a framework for the interchange and preservation of content and metadata, a collection of elements to describe that content, and a set of controlled vocabularies listing the values for those elements. The working group focused on metadata for: (1) General-purpose description of resources as a whole (2) Specification of a resource's relationships to other resources. (3) Definition of intellectual property rights and permissions. (4) Expressing inline metadata (that is, markup within the resource itself). Like the ICE protocol, PRISM is designed be straightforward to use over the Internet, support a wide variety of applications, not constrain data formats of the resources being described, conform to a specific XML syntax, and be constrained to practical and implementable mechanisms. The PRISM group's emphasis on implementable mechanisms is key to many of the choices made in this specification. For example, the elements provided for describing intellectual property rights are not intended to be a complete, general-purpose rights language that will let unknown parties do business with complete confidence and settle their accounts with micro-transactions. Instead, it provides elements needed for the most common cases encountered when one publisher of information wants to reuse material from another. Its focus is on reducing the cost of compliance with existing contracts that have been negotiated between a publisher and their business partners."