[May 10, 2001] Cogitum Proposes BannerML as New XML Language For Creating Descriptions of Internet Banner Products. From a 2001-01-24 company announcement: Cogitum LC "announced today the pre-release of BannerML, a new language for creating user-friendly descriptions of products advertised in Internet banners. BannerML would allow advertisers to attach additional text information to banners. It is targeted to the end-user, and it describes recommended fields (tags) of information about the advertised product. Text marked using BannerML would be delivered directly to the user's computer without any serious changes in current banner delivery technology. BannerML is based on the XML format, so it is similar to many industries' mark-up languages. However, it is not intended for marking up banners, per se, but rather for marking up new text information associated with a banner. BannerML would provide significant benefits to advertisers and users alike. It increases business opportunities for all companies in the Internet advertisement business, yet it is technically extremely easy to support and handle, and it is ready for wide-scale use after just minor adaptations of existing software. Support of this language does not require any changes at the ad delivering sites, but full utilization of BannerML opportunities will require some software components on the end-user's side. Cogitum is developing BannerML in response to the challenges that face the Internet advertising market-banner ads have a short life span, are generally intrusive (i.e., to click on an ad means the user must abandon whatever he was doing previously), and they provide extremely limited information. The quickly dropping click-though rate experienced by banner advertisers is only a symptom of these limitations..." See also the BannerML Technical Description; it "includes a description of tags which structure information attached to the banner so that it can be placed directly in different fields in the user's database." Compare "adXML.org: XML for Advertising."
"The following features make BannerML different from other existing formats: (1) It presents semantic information about the banner ad, giving the user access to the meaning of the image instead of purely technical data; (2) It has been developed for advertising; (3) It is targeted to the end-user Of course, some of the existing formats allow the advertiser to assign both technical (resolution, size, etc.) and semantic (copyright, name, topic) information. However, BannerML is targeted to the end-user of banner ads, providing structured adverising information. After developing some additional features, Image Co-Tracker will be able to work with any XML application. This will allow the program to provide information describing a banner ad, in any existing format, not in BannerML only..."
References:
- BannerML web site
- Cogitum LC
- Announcement: "Cogitum Announces Pre-Release of New Language for Creating Descriptions of Internet Banner Products." [source]
- Example BannerML document
- [May 16, 2001] Meeting of the SGML/XML Users Group. Wednesday, May 16, 2000 at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) at 2000 Florida Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20009-1277. Presenter: Leonid Malkov, Cogitum. "The presentation will focus on the discussion of personal content management systems, exploiting XML technology. General advantages of the personal content management will be discussed, along with the implementation of such features in Cogitum's SenseViewer, a content management software targeted towards the needs of individuals users, with potentials for integration into enterprise level. The presentation will also go over preliminary release of BannerML, an XML language for e-shopping applications. Special attention will be devoted to personal tools for organizing information collected from the Internet including databases of images, banners, and text fragments (Co-Tracker and Co-Citer).
- Related:
