Contents:
| Last modified: August 02, 2007 |
| Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) |
Overview
The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) specification defines an XML metadata vocabulary for managing, aggregating, post-processing, multi-purposing and aggregating magazine, news, catalog, book, and mainstream journal content. PRISM recommends the use of certain existing standards, such as XML, RDF, the Dublin Core, and various ISO specifications for locations, languages, and date/time formats. In addition 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.
Metadata is an exceedingly broad category of information covering everything from an article's country of origin to the fonts used in its layout. PRISM's scope is driven by the needs of publishers to receive, track, and deliver multi-part content. The focus is on additional uses for the content, so metadata concerning the content's appearance is outside PRISM's scope. PRISM focused on metadata for:
- General-purpose description of resources as a whole
- Specification of a resource's relationships to other resources
- Definition of intellectual property rights and permissions
- Expressing inline metadata — that is, markup within the resource itself
[June 19, 2004] "PRISM consists of two specifications. The PRISM Specification, itself, provides definition for the overall PRISM framework. A second specification, the PRISM Aggregator DTD is a new standard format for publishers to use for delivery of content to web sites and to aggregators and syndicators. It is an XML DTD that provides a simple, flexible model for transmitting content and PRISM metadata.
The PRISM Specification defines a collection of metadata elements for common publishing needs. But to apply them in specific situations, such as for delivery of content to web sites and secondary licensing partners, it is necessary to define formats, typically through a series of DTDs (Document Type Definitions), that combine PRISM metadata with content markup to support those specific processing objectives. The PRISM Aggregator Message DTD is such a specific standard.
The Aggregator XML tag set has been designed to meet the business requirements of the members of the Working Group. After examining numerous samples from every publisher, the group did an extensive review of all requirements and how an aggregator tag set could address them...
The 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..."
[October 06, 2000] "PRISM is an extensible XML metadata standard for syndicating, aggregating, post-processing and multi-purposing content from magazines, news, catalogs, books and mainstream journals. It is clear to most observers that the publishing industry needs a standard metadata vocabulary to realize the potential of online publishing and e-commerce in the publishing industry. PRISM provides a framework for the interchange and preservation of content and metadata. PRISM also provides a set of controlled vocabularies with which to describe the content being interchanged. Thus PRISM will provide a common interchange that greatly expands the market for licensed content."
[June 08, 2001] Description: "PRISM is a metadata specification originally intended for use in the magazine industry, where production, repurposing, aggregation, syndication, and archiving are topics of interest. Its utility extends beyond that industry, to any organization that needs to develop such functionality. Rather than reinvent the wheel, PRISM recommends certain practices, such as the use of XML, namespaces, RDF, and the Dublin Core. It then defines a few extra namespaces for more specific information. The 1.0 version of the specification is available from www.prismstandard.org. Interwoven, and several of our partners, have already announced support of the PRISM spec. Other vendors, and content providers such as Time Inc. and Getty Images, have too..." [posting from Ron Daniel 2001-06-08]
Relationship of PRISM to other standards:
- RDF: "RDF defines a model and XML syntax to represent and transport metadata. PRISM uses a metadata framework based on a simplified profile of RDF. However, PRISM compliant applications are required to generate metadata that can be processed by RDF processing applications."
- Dublin Core: "PRISM has defined some controlled values and recommended practices for using the Dublin Core vocabulary and has added additional terms when necessary."
- NewsML: "There is some overlap between the two standards, but PRISM and NewsML are largely complimentary to each other. The PRISM specification does leverage much of the work done in NewsML, making use of a number of elements defined in NewsML."
- NITF: "Although NITF has some elements to specify metadata and header information that are duplicated in PRISM, there is a complimentary affinity between the two standards. A number of PRISM elements map to elements in the NITF DTD, and those mappings are called out later in this specification."
- ICE: "...there is a natural synergy between ICE and PRISM. ICE provides the second half of the puzzle. PRISM, which aims to provide an industry standard vocabulary for the exchange and reuse of magazine, book, journal and news content, provides the first."
- MIME: "Due its widespread adoption and the availability of MIME-aware tools, this version of the PRISM specification recommends MIME as the means of packaging metadata and multiple associated resources in a single transmission."
PRISM Rights Language (PRL). "Collections of PRL statements are known as PRL expressions. The purpose of a PRL expression is to determine if a person or organization may or may not make use of a resource in a particular way. PRL expressions evaluate to a Boolean value that indicates if a particular use is allowed (if the expression evaluates to true) or not (if the expression evaluates to false).... Licensing content for reuse is a major source of revenue for many publishers. Conforming to licensing agreements is a major cost -- not only to the licensee of the content but also to the licensor. For these reasons, PRISM provides elements and controlled vocabularies for the purpose of describing the rights and permissions granted to the receiver of content. The PRISM specification provides those elements in two namespaces. Basic, commonly used, elements are defined as part of the PRISM namespace. A separate namespace is defined for the elements in the PRISM Rights Language (PRL). Since the field of Digital Rights Management (DRM) is evolving so quickly, the working group decided it would be premature to recommend one of the current DRM standards for rights information, such as the eXtensible rights Markup Language or Open Digital Rights Language. The working group expects that a rights management language will eventually become an accepted standard. As an interim measure, the working group focused on specifying a small set of elements that would encode the most common rights information to allow interoperable exchange of basic rights information. To do this, the PRISM rights language makes a couple of simplifying assumption. It assumes that the sender and receiver of content are engaged in a business relation. It may be a formal contract or an informal provision of freely redistributable content. One of the parties may not know the other. Nevertheless, a relation exists and if needed we could make up an identifier for it, such as the contact number. PRL also assumes that its purpose is to reduce the costs of conformance to that relation. The working group explicitly rejected imposing any requirements on enforcing trusted commerce between unknown parties. Instead, the emphasis is on reducing the cost of compliance in common situations. Organizations implementing DRM functionality are advised that several companies have obtained patents on various techniques for implementing such functionality. Implementers of DRM functionality may wish to investigate further, the PRISM working group takes no stance on such patents nor has it investigated it... The PRISM rights and permissions vocabulary is designed to facilitate reuse and clearance processes for parties with established business relationships by explicitly specifying the rights and/or restrictions connected with a resource. PRISM is NOT concerned with digital rights enforcement. PRISM does not specify policy or provide instructions to trusted viewers and repositories on how they should behave. PRISM also does not specify fee or payment details... The design goals of rights and permissions are: (1) To be able to describe reuse rights in a precise and consistent manner; (2) To make simple cases such as no rights or unrestricted use simple to specify; (3) To provide the capability to indicate common types of uses or restriction; (4) To allow for graceful evolution to future accepted standards for specifying rights..." For related work, see OASIS Rights Language. [from PRISM: Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata"]
Principal References
- PRISM Web site at prismstandard.org
- PRISM Web site at IDEAlliance
- What is PRISM?
- PRISM news
- Related: "AdsML Consortium" for content related to advertising.
General: Articles, Papers, News, Reports
[August 02, 2007] "PRISM 2.0 Specification Comment Period Begins. PRISM V2.0 Addresses Internet Content." — PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata), an IDEAlliance Working Group, has announced the availability of the new PRISM 2.0 Specifications for industry comment. In 1999, IDEAlliance founded the PRISM Working Group to address the emerging requirements by publishers to utilize standardized metadata to facilitate content management and aggregation as well as to facilitate search. Since that time the PRISM metadata framework has been broadly implemented by both magazine and journal publishers. PRISM 2.0 is the first major revision in the specification since its initial release in 2001. This major revision of PRISM addresses the new requirements for publishers and media companies to deliver content in an online multimedia environment, as well as in print. According to Lee Vetten, McGraw-Hill Business Information Group's Co-Chair of the PRISM Working Group, "PRISM 2.0 heralds a new generation for PRISM. Today's magazine publishers have made a dramatic shift to delivering eMedia-based content online as well as traditional print magazines. The development of PRISM 2.0 reflects the commitment of the PRISM Working Group to mirror today's new publishing models in the specification." One of the major changes in PRISM 2.0 is the inclusion of a new compliance profile for PRISM XMP. Until this time, the use of PRISM metadata was limited to the XML / RDF environment. Now the new PRISM XMP profile (profile three), provides publishers with the capability to embed PRISM metadata directly into multimedia objects that are so critical to magazine publishing in the online environment. Dianne Kennedy: "...we have undertaken an aggressive update of the PRISM Specification to address content that, for the first time, appears online before it is cast in print. In addition we have focused on extending PRISM to address many more media formants and have redesigned and enhanced our controlled vocabularies to provide for more sophisticated metadata encoding based on delivery media, presentation format and genre. The PRISM Working Group is open to all IDEAlliance members and includes: the Hachette Filipacchi Media, McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., Platts, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., Conde Naste Publishing, Poundhill Software, Adobe Systems, Really Strategies, Time Inc., U.S. News and World Report, Factiva/Dow Jones and L.A. Burman Associates.
"PRISM Metadata Specification Modularized. PRISM Specification is Made Available as a Modularized Set." - "PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata), an IDEAlliance Working Group, announced the availability of a modularized version of the PRISM 1.2 Specification. PRISM Specifications are available online... Since the founding of the PRISM Working Group in 1999, this working group single-handedly developed the PRISM metadata framework and all metadata vocabularies for publishers. Now that the framework has been established and the value of standardized metadata for publishing has been recognized and is being broadly implemented, a call has come from publishers to expand the PRISM umbrella, defining more metadata vocabularies built upon the established PRISM architecture. In the fall of 2004, IDEAlliance designated PRISM as the architecture for all publishing metadata specifications within IDEAlliance moving forward. It also recognized that the growing requirement for additional metadata vocabularies would outpace the capabilities of a single PRISM Working Group. IDEAlliance recognized that they needed to organize so that several working groups could advance PRISM in a coordinated manner. A first step in this process is to separate the PRISM Specification into separate modules that can be maintained and extended individually. The aggressive effort to modularize PRISM began in the fall of 2004 while the newest version of PRISM was awaiting final approval by the IDEAlliance Board of Directors. An expedited effort to modularize the new specification was required so that PRISM metadata sets could be advanced in 2005. IDEAlliance contracted with Joe McConnell, the current PRISM Specification Editor, to expedite the modularization effort. Joe began by proposing a modular breakdown of the specification, which was approved by the Working Group. Next he developed detailed outlines for each module. Finally McConnell developed the copy for each module, derived from the existing PRISM Specification. The modularization effort proceeded employing the IDEAlliance specification change control mechanism to review the new PRISM modules and track changes that resulted from the review process. In addition, IDEAlliance editorial staff provided final copy edits to the specification package. As of this release, PRISM is described in a set of formal, modularized documents that, taken together, represent 'the PRISM Specification.' Together these documents comprise the PRISM Documentation Package. The initial release of the modularized PRISM Documentation Package, is the equivalent of the single document PRISM 1.2 Specification that was approved in December 2004. Moving forward, the monolithic PRISM Specification will no longer be maintained. All revisions will be made to individual documents in the PRISM Documentation Package, with each being versioned separately. Over time, new documents may also be added to the documentation set that makes up the PRISM Specification..."
[October 17, 2002] "PRISM: Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata." By IDEAlliance and the PRISM Working Group. Version 1.2 (e). First Public Draft. September 4, 2002. 95 pages. "The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) specification defines a standard for interoperable content description, interchange, and reuse in both traditional and electronic publishing contexts. PRISM recommends the use of certain existing standards, such as XML, RDF, the Dublin Core, and various ISO specifications for locations, languages, and date/time formats. Beyond those recommendations, it defines a small number of XML namespaces and controlled vocabularies of values, in order to meet the goals listed above. The PRISM working group, a joint effort of representatives from publishers and vendors in an initiative organized under IDEAlliance, prepared this specification... PRISM's scope is driven by the needs of publishers to receive, track, and deliver multi-part content. The focus is on additional uses for the content, so metadata concerning the content's appearance is outside PRISM's scope. 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." Version 1.2e Status: "This is the first public draft for the 1.2 release of the PRISM Metadata specification. Several elements have been added, and some existing elements renamed. Many of the definitions of the elements have been rewritten for clarity and precision, and more examples of their use have been provided. Future drafts of the 1.2 specification will add even more examples of the use of the PRISM elements. The 1.2 specification makes a number of changes relative to the 1.0 version: (1) The 'profile' was removed; a new section was added which discusses how this spec may be used by other specifications, such as the article DTD. (2) Additions: the working group decided to add the Section, Page, Volume, Number, IssueName, and Edition elements; the terms stockQuote, newsResult, and portrait were added to the controlled vocabulary of content genre. (3) xml:lang: PRISM has strengthened its recommendation around the use of xml:lang to indicate the language of the metadata record. (4) namespace URLs: PRISM namespaces and vocabularies were updated from 1.0 to 1.2. See the announcement of September 10, 2002: "PRISM Gains Traction and Announces Companion Specifications. Working Group Members Hearst, LexisNexis, Time Inc. and Others Develop Standardized Markup to Automate Common Publishing and Content Processes." [cache]
[October 27, 2003] "Industry Milestone: New Standard for Online Content Ready for Prime Time. Time Inc., LexisNexis, Hearst Publishing, Platts/McGraw-Hill, ProQuest and Others to Begin Using PRISM Aggregator Specification for Content Delivery and Acquisition." - "Publishers, aggregators, syndicators and other content companies are now ready to exchange content for secondary licensing using a standardized XML format -- the newly released PRISM specification, the PRISM Aggregator DTD (Document Type Definition) Version 1.0. Time Inc., a founding member of the PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata) Working Group involved in development of the new DTD, is working with its aggregator partners, including PRISM members LexisNexis and ProQuest, to put the new format into production by the end of this year... The new PRISM Aggregator DTD was developed by members of PRISM, an IDEAlliance Working Group, in close cooperation with publishers and content aggregators. The new DTD is a use case of the PRISM specification offering a standard format for publishers to mark up and transmit magazine and journal content to aggregators and to push data to their internal web sites... By providing the industry with a standardized vocabulary and rules for defining content electronically, the PRISM Aggregator DTD enables aggregators to lower their costs of bringing new sources of information online. It also enables them to publish the content online more quickly, making it more valuable both to them and to the owners of that content... The Aggregator DTD is the result of a comprehensive review of publisher and aggregator requirements begun in September 2002. The DTD, combined with extensive documentation and samples, is now available for download from the PRISM website. It is being put into testing and production by companies such as Time Inc., LexisNexis, ProQuest, Hearst Publishing and The McGraw-Hill Companies' Platts division. The PRISM aggregator DTD includes basic structural elements found in any serial publication or web-based editorial, such as paragraph headings, photographs and sub-headings. Future releases of the DTD will include additional elements to aid searching and to help track copyright ownership, rights and permissions information, and license agreements. The PRISM working group has adopted well-established industry standards as part of its specifications. The PRISM Aggregator DTD provides customization of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XHTML standard and a set of PRISM metadata that augments the widely-accepted Dublin Core metadata standard. Where appropriate, PRISM will continue to adopt additional complimentary standards in the future. The PRISM specification was first released in April of 2001..." See also: (1) the news story "XML 2003 News Standards Summit Seeks Interoperability and Convergence"; (2) "Atom as the New XML-Based Web Publishing and Syndication Format"
[July 17, 2003] "Elsevier Proposes PRISM Module for RSS 1.0." By Edd Dumbill. From XMLhack (July 17, 2003). "Tony Hammond from Elsevier has announced a PRISM module for RSS 1.0, and provided some example data feeds, including one for Nature. PRISM, Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata, defines a vocabulary for syndicating, aggregating, post-processing and multi-purposing magazine, news, catalog, book, and mainstream journal content... " The PRISM RSS 1.0 module augments the RSS core and Dublin Core module's metadata with channel and item-level elements specific to PRISM-based sites. See the posting "PRISM RSS 1.0 + RDFS" and the proposal: "RDF Site Summary 1.0 Modules: PRISM."
[October 17, 2002] "Thinking XML: Shedding Light on PRISM. A Standard Metadata Vocabulary for Publishing." By Uche Ogbuji (Principal Consultant, Fourthought, Inc). From IBM developerWorks, XML zone. October 2002. ['PRISM is a standard for metadata related to publishing. It allows the formal description of content and related resources by providing standardized properties, controlled vocabularies, and extensibility mechanisms that enable users to define their own controlled vocabularies. In this column, Uche Ogbuji introduces PRISM by example.'] "The various industries related to publishing were among the earliest to support XML and to explore its value in practice. This is not surprising as the publishing industry has been been a stalwart of SGML, the parent of XML. The Information and Content Exchange protocol, or ICE, emerged in 1998 as one of the earliest major industry standards to use XML. ICE is a protocol for directing the distribution of content electronically to various partners presenting the content on the Internet. XML is well-suited to another important requirement in the publishing industry: content metadata management. ICE provides the mechanism for exchanging content, but even the ICE specification admits that there needs to be a formal means for describing that content. To meet this need, the publishing industry has developed Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM), an XML metadata standard for directing the processing of content. PRISM covers a wide variety of content, from catalogs to books -- and a wide variety of media, from various forms of electronic publishing to various forms of print. PRISM is being developed by a working group of IDEAlliance (formerly known as GCA), a consortium of publishers involved with electronic technological infrastructure. PRISM members include technology vendors such as Adobe Systems, Inc., news agencies such as Reuters, and publishers such as Condi Nast. In this article, I introduce PRISM, focusing on the current draft of the PRISM 1.2 specification. Readers should be familiar with XML and RDF..."
[September 16, 2002] "Context Media Pledges Support for PRISM. Context Media Reaffirms Commitment to Key Industry Open Standards Initiatives." - "Context Media, Inc. today announced further commitment to the adoption of open standards for managing enterprise content through its support for PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata). The goal of open standards initiatives like PRISM is to provide customers with the freedom of choice to take advantage of multi-vendor, interoperable enterprise content management solutions. PRISM is a key industry initiative hosted by IDEAlliance and sponsored by a group of companies who have an interest in creating and using a common metadata standard as a basic part of the content infrastructure. PRISM metadata helps automate the flow of content by providing information about the content being exchanged, including rights information, content indexes, creation and publication dates, and how specific pieces of content relate to other content. The PRISM vocabulary makes it possible for publishers to efficiently repurpose content; improve search precision for querying and data mining; automate globalization; improve process control and automation; and facilitate the management of rights and permissions. Context Media's Interchange Suite has given enterprises the opportunity to take advantage of the full value of their content without disrupting their current workflow or replacing their current content/asset management infrastructure. Through the Interchange's foundation in open standards and XML based technologies, its extensible schema can incorporate the PRISM vocabulary in order to provide publishers with the specific tools they need to execute their crucial daily business activities. Through the Suite's tools, enterprises can quickly locate assets based on PRISM criteria, such as an item's presentation type, subject, creation date, or whether or not the organization has the necessary rights to reuse the content. Once the desired assets are identified, they can be made available to the appropriate individuals or departments to be efficiently and confidently repurposed or redistributed..."
[September 10, 2002] "PRISM Gains Traction and Announces Companion Specifications. Working Group Members Hearst, LexisNexis, Time Inc. and Others Develop Standardized Markup to Automate Common Publishing and Content Processes." - Members of PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata), an IDEAlliance Working Group, today announced they have expanded the group's scope by creating standardized XML DTDs (
document type definitions) based on the PRISM standard. The new DTDs will address common content applications faced by publishers and aggregators, and are designed to help lower costs by providing a single format for all organizations to maintain. In addition, having a standardized XML format lowers the entry point for smaller organizations that can now send their content to aggregators who plan to implement the DTDs to receive content from larger publishers. Lastly, providing the articles in XML offers more capability, since organizations will now be able to markup their content in new ways. 'This is excellent news for PRISM and demonstrates the tremendous value provided by having a consistent language for publishers and other content providers,' said Amre Youssef, Director of Publishing Technologies at Hearst Magazines. 'This also broadens the applicability of PRISM metadata to the industry as a whole.' The DTDs are being developed to enable members of the Working Group, as well as other companies wishing to adopt PRISM, to more easily implement the specifications. The PRISM Group's goal is to address critical, yet common business workflow problems for content companies by providing XML DTDs that combine PRISM metadata with specific types of content markup. As part of today's announcement, the PRISM Group will be making available this month an XML DTD for describing magazine article content to enable automated delivery to aggregators and other companies. The DTD extends PRISM metadata with markup to describe article content such as paragraph headings, photographs and sub-headings. 'By enabling the delivery of detailed information in a consistent format, the new DTD allows publishers and other content-related companies to better communicate with a broader range of partners who are just now standardizing on XML,' said Ron Daniel Jr., Principal of Taxonomy Strategies and editor of the PRISM specification. 'Having a standardized format describing magazine article content will cut the costs associated with aggregating content, while the use of PRISM and XML provides greater capabilities for publishers.' 'Companies like ours manage content from a large number of sources,' said Chet Ensign, Sr. Director of Architecture & Development Services at LexisNexis. 'Today, we receive metadata in as many different formats as content. We believe the PRISM standard, by providing a standard metadata vocabulary, can help us streamline our processes significantly.' Since its establishment in 1999, the PRISM Working Group has grown and diversified. Publishers such as Hachette, McGraw-Hill and Time Inc. are now joined by newer members such as Hearst Magazines, Gruner + Jahr, Lippincott, Reed Business Information US, and LexisNexis. Marketing professionals, application providers, linguists, publishers, content aggregators, standards architects and developers have joined to take advantage of the standard's ability to help them automate and manage their content workflow process, while jointly developing specifications that work for all content...""PRISM: Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata." Specification Version 1.0. April 9, 2001. With errata. "The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) specification defines a standard for interoperable content description, interchange, and reuse in both traditional and electronic publishing contexts. PRISM recommends the use of certain existing standards, such as XML, RDF, the Dublin Core, and various ISO specifications for locations, languages, and date/time formats. Beyond those recommendations, it defines a small number of XML namespaces and controlled vocabularies of values, in order to meet the goals listed above." [cache]
[March 07, 2001] PRISM: Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata. 'Public Last Call' for Version 1.0, March 5, 2001. "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 PRISM working group, a joint effort of representatives from publishers and vendors in an initiative hosted by IDEAlliance, prepared this specification. Comments for the working group may be sent to prism@idealliance.org. [cache]
[December 06, 2000] "Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) Specification. Version 1.0 beta B." By the PRISM/IDEAlliance Group. November 20, 2000. "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 PRISM working group, a joint effort of representatives from publishers and vendors in an initiative hosted by IDEAlliance, prepared this 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." [cache]
Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) Specification. Edited by Deren Hansen and Cameron Pope. Version 1.0 beta. August 28, 2000. 59 pages. Abstract: "This document is the Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) specification. PRISM focuses on the format and presentation of content, reuse rights and restrictions. To that end, PRISM defines a MIME-based interchange format, an extensible metadata framework based on RDF, a vocabulary and controlled property values. We expect PRISM to be useful in automating clearance and reuse processes, both in traditional publishing contexts and in business-to-business relationships." [Purpose and Scope:] 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, and also provides a collection of controlled vocabularies to describe the content being exchanged. 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 working group focused on four kinds of metadata: (1) Metadata for the general-purpose description of resources as a whole (2) Metadata about a resource's relationships to other resources. (3) Metadata for specific purposes such as intellectual property rights and permissions. (4) Inline metadata (that is, markup within the resource itself) when necessary to meet strong needs expressed by publishers, realizing that standards such as NITF exist to define inline markup." Also in HTML format. [cache]
[August 29, 2000] "XML Standard Simplifies e-commerce for Publishing Industry. PRISM Working Group releases first public specification." - ""Publishers and other content providers who want a common means of exchanging, syndicating and re-purposing digital content now have an industry standard vocabulary. The International Digital Enterprise Alliance (IDEAlliance) today announced that it has released the first publicly available version of the PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata) standard. The Beta specification is available at www.IDEAlliance.org/PRISM. There are also copies of the specification available at the IDEAlliance booth in the XML Pavilion at Seybold Seminars 2000 in San Francisco. The culmination of more than a year's work by leading publishers and publishing software vendors, the PRISM specification delivers an extensible industry standard vocabulary for syndicating, aggregating, post-processing and multi-purposing magazine, news, catalog, book and mainstream journal content. This will greatly expand the market for licensed content. The PRISM specification defines an XML metadata vocabulary. It provides a framework for the exchange and preservation of content and metadata, and also provides a set of controlled vocabularies used to describe the content being exchanged." [cache]
[October 06, 2000] PRISM Profile of the Resource Description Framework." Posting to 'www-rdf-interest@w3.org' by Ron Daniel. 2000-10-06. "The Resource Description Framework (RDF) has been standardized by the W3C to provide a general framework for metadata. As such, its capabilities exceed those required by PRISM. Therefore, this document specifies a 'profile' - a restricted subset - of RDF that all PRISM-compliant software must support. This profile excludes certain capabilities of RDF that are not needed in PRISM applications, thus simplifying the development of PRISM applications that cannot, for one reason or another, make use of an existing RDF parsing frontend. Applications conforming to the PRISM specification MUST produce correct RDF documents that can be read by any RDF-compliant software. PRISM-compliant software does not have to be capable of processing any arbitrary RDF documents. There are three general classes of simplification this document makes in its profile of RDF. First, there are certain capabilities of RDF that are excluded. Second, there are some syntactic abbreviations allowed in RDF that are excluded from PRISM documents. Third, there are conventions adopted for the syntax used to express information where RDF allows multiple ways of saying the same thing... [The post said: "In response to Gabe Beged-Dov's request, the PRISM Working Group has authorized me to send out our suggested profile of RDF for wider review. Please send any comments this list. I will take care of feeding the comments back to the PRISM working group, and notifying this list of the results of deliberations about the comments. Be aware that this profile may get more restrictive over time as we examine more and more sample data from our publishing members. PRISM's goal is to be implementable, so the less opportunity for ambiguity the better."] [cache]
Related rights languages:
- "XML and Digital Rights Management (DRM)" - Main reference page.
- OASIS Rights Language
- Patents and Open Standards
- Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL)
- "Extensible Rights Markup Language (XrML)."
- Digital Property Rights Language (DPRL)
- MPEG Rights Expression Language
- "<indecs>2rdd Consortium - Rights Data Dictionary."
- Extensible Media Commerce Language (XMCL)
- Open Ebook Initiative Rights and Rules Working Group (OeBF)
- Electronic Book Exchange (EBX) Working Group
