Last post’s first pillar of knowledge management may appear only to be relevant to authors, and therefore to publishing organizations that control their own creation phase of their own complete content supply chain. In fact, I’ve been told that to adopt Pillar One is contrary to traditional and conventional wisdom in commercial publishing, and economically unsound for that domain. But, I’ve seen and experienced the opposite, and together with certain publishing company senior managers and executives, we force the evolution of their organizations’ traditional views, conventional wisdom, and craft-based processes. Read the rest of this entry »

How is re-engineering documents in XML a pillar of knowledge management? Let’s revisit both, using straightforward models, possibly idealized, based on my experience and assumptions.

XML markup is meta-data which is topical, explicit, specific, precise, and unambiguous, used to describe document content. Typographical clues are meta-data which is visual, implicit, general, inexact, and ambiguous, used to describe document content. During document production, applying XML markup rather than applying typographical clues becomes the content-organizing value-add of the author or editor. In either case, with regards to the document content, whatever the author/editor “knows and expresses” becomes impersonally deliverable to a consumer who “needs to know”. Read the rest of this entry »

I was thinking about a post topic when I noticed it was XML’s 10th birthday, which makes it also SGML’s 20th birthday. I’d been involved with SGML since 1989 (when it was a toddler). By 1994, I had several staff who would help to conceive XML, then participate in its gestation, labor, delivery, and upbringing. Read the rest of this entry »