Page 293 -
P. 293
276 Chapter 8
applications was to combine real estate listings with the location map drawn from
Google Maps. The integration is typically undertaken by retrieving content from pub-
licly available sources, combining continuous web feeds such as RSS or using some of
the newly created mashup editors and programming languages. Mashups make it very
easy to combine different media such as text and images, videos, maps, and news
feeds. There is, however, an issue with intellectual property and information privacy
that will need to be ironed out with this new emergent technology ( Zang, Rosson,
and Nasser 2008 ).
Within a business context, however, if the content to be combined is clearly avail-
able for use by the company and its employees, then mashups become an intriguing
means of creating new content from old. Some popular business uses of mashups to
date have been to create presentations that contain aggregated content and to support
collaborative work such as joint authoring of content. In a way, mashups may also be
considered as knowledge portals — both are aggregate content. However, mashups do
so in a much more dynamic way (portals are discussed later in this chapter).
Content Management Tools
Content management refers to the management of valuable content throughout the
useful life span of the content. Content life span will typically begin with content
creation, handle multiple changes and updates, merging, summarization, and other
repackaging and will typically end with archiving. Metadata (information about the
content) is used to better manage content throughout its useful life span. Metadata
includes such information as source/author, keywords to describe content, date
created, date changed, quality, best purposes, annotations by those who have made
use of it, and an expiry or best before date where applicable. Additional attributes such
the storage medium, location, and whether or not it exists in a number of alternative
forms (e.g., different languages) are also useful to include. XML is increasingly being
used to tag knowledge content. Taxonomies serve to better organize and classify
content for easier future retrieval and use.
XML (eXtensible markup language) provides the ability to structure and add rele-
vance to chunks of information (that ’ s why many CM solutions use XML), and in
theory, exchange data more easily between applications, for example, with your sup-
pliers, customers, and partners. However, you may all use the same words (tags), but
if each of you defi nes and applies them differently, then we remain in the land of
Babel. Common agreed schemas are essential. Keep tabs with developments on the
schemas and metadata standards in your fi eld. Useful sources are XML.org (http://
www.xml.org) the W3C XML schemas section — http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema.