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

Hi Paola,

My opinion is that content has the hope of being at least 
semi-structured.  That is, it can be stored in a structure that isolates 
  particular attributes (for example title, summary, body...) so that 
they can be rendered in different ways.  To me, the word "Document" 
describes a file that includes, the content, format, and the 
instructions to render that format (Microsoft Word, PDF, MOV, etc.) and 
the best you can do for managing structured attributes is metadata which 
may replicate some of the text/information that appears within the 
document itself.

So a content creator can either author content into a Content Management 
System (which stores the information in a structured repository) or a 
document that then can be put into a document system which stores the 
document.

There are various strategies for taking an asset that has been authored 
as a document (where the author is playing the roles of designer and 
writer) and programmatically parse through it to extract the content. 
However, those strategies are prone to errors because the author might 
fiddle with their authoring program to achieve a visual effect but 
inadvertantly confound the parsing engine.  A typical example of this is 
a MS Word user overrides the font of an H1 style to achieve the look of 
a paragraph body.  In this case the parsing engine might think that 
whole paragraph was a section title.

I hope this helps the dialog.

--Seth



Content-wire Research wrote:
> 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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>>
>>
> 
> 
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-- 
Seth Gottlieb, Optaros, Inc.
155 Second Street, Cambridge, MA 02142
617.225.2455(v),  617.852.2956(m)