February 13, 1997

KnowledgeView tackles Web-based editorial system

Collaboration, dynamic delivery tools take content from the desktop to the Web

If Web publishing is ever to form a part of the mainstream publishing process, it will need a more streamlined form of data entry than today's page-by-page HTML editors. KnowledgeView, a UK developer, has introduced dynamic site authoring software that allows authors and editors to enter and edit content through Web browsers. Underneath the nice interface is a database-driven system designed to handle groups of collaborators. It is one of a new breed of editorial systems (NetObjects, Vignette and Ikonic also come to mind) developed to support collaborative Web publishing.

KnowledgeView developed the current form of its software for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which needed an editorial system to enter and organize "real time" dynamic multilingual content at its World Food Summit in Rome last November (www.fao.org). The commercial packages grew out of this work, and KnowledgeView is now setting up a network of dealers and VARs to handle them.

The first major client since FAO is McGraw-Hill's Byte magazine, which is using KnowledgeView software in the development of a Web archive site for its Arabic Middle Eastern edition.

Based in Surbiton, to the southwest of London, KnowledgeView was set up in 1995 by Dr. Ali Al-Assam, previously cofounder and development and marketing director of Diwan, a company well known in newspaper circles for its picture desks and image databases.

KnowledgeView's RapidPublish is an editorial system, primarily for automating Web publishing, but one that builds a content database that can be re-purposed for other media. Authors can enter text, still images, movies, sound and other types of content, and decide parameters such as links, categories, sections, and the time and date of both publication and expiration. Links can be made to objects in a RapidPublish/RapidArchive database, or to external URLs.

Editorial entry screen. Writers and editors enter the system through a home page using password access. Editors assign writers view and edit access to specific stories, all of which are logged into the Basis database. The editorial staff can view lists of articles or summary links, using the five levels of article status and any textual information as a filter for listing. The list uses icons to show the state of progress of any one article (incomplete, complete, cleared, published or mark deleted). The link button on any entry makes it possible to list, at the lower window, articles linked to summaries or vice versa. In this example, clicking on the link button for the article titled Water Shortage results in a listing of summaries linked to that article in the lower window: one summary with the name Water in the Global section of the Web site and the other with the name Solar Pumps in the Industry section of the Web site.

There's also a provision for an "editing" stage, when authors are given privileges to upload and define, but not to publish. Editors can check and change the content if needed before releasing it for publication. They can also track the workflow using "editors' views," which show story names, dates, status and links.

If required, entries and editing can be performed via the World Wide Web, using standard browsers and KnowledgeView's configurable Web templates. Authors and editors are presented with a form-like user interface, where they can enter or paste in text, graphics or other media files, and define the parameters and links. E-mail entry is also supported. No HTML or other technical knowledge is required of authors and editors. Content can be entered or edited locally or over the Web by anyone with the right access privileges.

Alternatively, authors can still choose to edit HTML files.

The system provides three levels of access privileges: general (for universal viewing on the Web); internal (for viewing things that you don't want to broadcast to the world); and editorial. There are also management privileges for system organization.

For deadline-critical sites, such as daily or hourly news updates, a time and date of publication can be set in advance, before which the material resides on the database but cannot be accessed from outside. A withdrawal feature stops publishing an item and marks it for deletion, after which a system administrator can decide at any time to delete it from the database.

Sites created by RapidPublish are dynamic, meaning that links presented to viewers lead to executable queries on the publisher's Web server, rather than static collections of HTML pages. Publishers can edit such information frequently without needing to track down file names and re-creating links.

Underpinning RapidPublish is KnowledgeView's MediaServer, based on the Basis document server from Information Dimensions (www.idi.oclc.org). Version 8 of the Basis software is now being integrated into MediaServer, which will give it even more advanced searches, such as fuzzy logic and "sounds-like" options. (For more on Basis 8, see pages 21-23 of our January 1997 issue.)

MediaServer runs under AIX, HP Unix or Sun Solaris. KnowledgeView's online demonstrator runs under AIX on an Apple NS 700 server.

Other components of RapidPublish are the database loading and editing of CGI scripts for the server host and a copy of Netscape Commerce Server. The total price depends on specification but will be around $20,000.

RapidArchive is also based around MediaServer, but it is intended for fast and easy creation of a multimedia content database and lacks RapidPublish's publishing components.

Data can be entered directly, but KnowledgeView's intention is for primary acquisition to be handled through its Media Workshop application running on a Power Macintosh. Media Workshop is used to capture multimedia content and extract article fields from text or image files. This can include header information, such as IPTC captions in image files. Extracted information is archived in HTML or PDF formats to fields in MediaServer, and all text is full-text indexed.

User-defined object-oriented media channels trigger sequences of actions such as downsampling, reformatting and relocating graphics files, or automatically backing up data to one location and deleting them from another. Channel creation is a drag-and-drop operation from icon choices.

Media Workshop can also be used with RapidPublish, when it allows virtually automatic repurposing and Web publishing from files originally intended for print. Apple has been sufficiently interested in the idea to distribute a demo copy of Media Workshop on cd-rom to its dealers.

Entries to RapidArchive can also be made from Web browsers, using templates similar to RapidPublish's, but without the specific publishing controls.

The price is around $15,000, again depending on the specification. MediaWorkshop can be purchased separately as a batch processor. It costs $75.

Given Dr. Al-Assam's background (he developed the first Arabic typesetting version of the Apple II) and experience at Diwan, it's not surprising that RapidPublish and Rapid Archive support non-Roman languages. All that is needed is the installation of the appropriate script system on clients' Windows or Macintosh computers.

It's still early days for RapidPublish and RapidArchive, but its ability to hide the nuts and bolts of HTML and CGI should attract the attention of publishers who want to set up high-volume Web and multimedia editorial operations without major retraining of dtp-oriented staff.

A prototype system can be tried out online at KnowledgeView's Web site:

www.knowledgeview.co.uk

By Simon Eccles

KnowledgeView Ltd
31 Victoria Road, Surbiton
Surrey KT6 4JT United Kingdom
Phone 44 181-399 9734, fax 44 181-339 9353
E-mail a.assam@knowledgeview.co.uk