Re: [OSCOM] Open source CMS / documents are content/

Thanks for the opportunity to discuss CMS and DM, as it has been bugging me 
lately

I am trying to establish the relationship between various classes of systems 
which have
similar functionalities, with a view to come up with a better defined 
ontology for our domain
 This mean, lets try to understand what this 'overlap' consists of

It all starts with having solid, agreed upon definitions, which we still 
working on

Here is my reasoning, recently circulated to CMPros which has not yielded 
any response/comments

Proposed definitions for
------------------------------

> Content  = Organisational Information and Data collected from internal and 
> external sources, stored  in any format (text, graphical multimedia, 
> digital and non digital).  Content can be structured  (documents, records) 
> and unstructured (discussion groups, bulletin boards)

>Document? = Content formatted in a specific file type  (.doc versus .pdf)

> File type = File extension determined by the software package it is 
> produced with


4) if the defintions above are true, then
documents are content
then content management includes document management
although document management may require file type specific functionalities

Please agree or disagree/comment


The above discussion applies to the post below  by srinivas/oliver becauz
when you think of application development of this sort, you've gotta think 
lateral
I say

Unless you have completely ruled out that your documents of today (words and 
pdfs) will not
be your content of tomorrow (html/xml) and viceversa, then you'd be wasting 
your time
thinking of them separately and not as a single application that can handle 
format independent data

Format independent means that anything that the data can be outputted to 
more than one desired format


Dont you think?

Paola Di Maio




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Oliver Crow" <[email protected]>
To: "srinivas mohan" <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 6:35 PM
Subject: Re: [OSCOM] Open source CMS


>
>
> On Tue, 16 Mar 2005, srinivas mohan wrote:
>
>> I am very new to CMS concepts..
> ...
>> The application i am intrested to build is to manage word and pdf 
>> documents with support to workflow mgmt and content distribution.
>
>
> This sounds to me like a "document management system" more than a "content 
> management system".  I guess there's a lot of overlap between the two.
>
> My understanding is that document management systems are primarily 
> concerned with the production and management of documents. They provide 
> workflow tools, archival, searching, and are usually agnostic about the 
> format of the stored content.
>
> CMSs are primarily concerned with content publishing.  They provide many 
> features similar to document management, and also provide content editing 
> tools.  They typically require that the content be stored in a format 
> editable and manipulable by the CMS, which usually means not Word or PDF.
>
> If your application is more about production and management of documents 
> than it is about publishing documents, perhaps the assumptions and feature 
> sets found in document management systems would be a better match.
>
>
> Oliver
>
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