'Innovation from product to production' at the STM E-Production Seminar

Posted on by Richard Padley
Written and delivered in partnership with Andrea Powell from CABI, this presentation is a case study of lessons drawn from the CAB Direct project, and highlights issues which are relevant across the board for publishers delivering online content. This includes looking at how to maximise value in the design of taxonomies and coding systems, how designing and improving user experience on the product side can lead to more stringent data quality requirements and some design strategies to minimise ongoing operational costs when designing data transfer workflows between systems. We also look at innovation in the design of machine level API interfaces. You can watch the full presentation (45 mins) given to the STM E-Production Seminar on 3rd December in Kensington London. Please note that the video will be displayed in a new window. More on this excellent seminar can be found at The International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers website. Video by River Valley TV.

The Challenge of Online Identity: Part 2

Posted on by Richard Padley
FingerprintIn part one of this series of three posts I attempted to describe the authentication and identity management environment that currently exists within the information industry. Next I’d like to look a bit more closely at the areas of personalisation, usage metrics and usability. These are all areas that hold significant challenges for online identity; issues which have particular bearing on the Web 2.0 services we all accept now as an established feature of mainstream internet use. Continue reading →

The Challenge of Online Identity

Posted on by Richard Padley
FingerprintPublishers and information providers are in danger of cultivating a blind spot to one of the key issues currently inhibiting the growth of online information services: identity management. The web as it exists today suffers from the lack of a consistent way of managing identity. There are challenges in both identifying myself to the sites I visit and in identifying those sites myself. Without any standard mechanism to deal with this, web developers have devised an array of different and incompatible schemes to manage identity. This presents serious challenges, since authenticity and trust are critically important concerns for publishers and information providers. Continue reading →

XML: Prior art or the missing tag?

Posted on by Richard Padley
XML: The missing tag?During my holiday travels this year I discovered what may be the “missing tag” in Carnac, south-west Brittany. Here is photographic evidence that 7,000 years ago neolithic technologists were interested in structured markup. Interestingly, the glyphs represented don’t seem to be present in the latest version of the Unicode standard. Did our ancestors know something we don’t?