TrendAlert: XML and Web Services – The Asteroids That Will Blow Up 500 Years of Publishing History

This Briefing describes how XML, Web Services, and a multitude of developing standards and protocols will permanently change the publishing industry. Publishers have long thought that their products were journals, books, documents, and other collections of content, rather than the underlying ideas and content in those packages. XML and Web Services technology is heading toward those players like an unseen asteroid that will explode that product

- and package-centric model. This Briefing describes the future of Contextual Publishing, in which technology will allow the automated delivery of content into workflows and tasks in very specific contexts. It identifies dozens of technologies and standards (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, XrML, DOI, IOTP, ICE) that make up the components of this new publishing architecture, and some of the companies (OneSource, Factiva, Hoover's, Thomson Financial) that are already applying them. For commercial content vendors, this Briefing is a road map for how the new technologies will revolutionize the purchase and sale of content. For content deployment professionals, it's a primer in the technologies around which they will have to partner with their IT departments.