The Internet Encyclopedia (Volume 3)

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690 WEBCONTENTMANAGEMENT

Cleveland Houston

San Francisco

WebDAV

protocol

WebDAV

protocol

WebDAV

server

DreamWeaver

GoLive 5.0

Netscape Composer

PhotoShop 7

XML Spy

PhotoShop 7

Concurrent

versions control

Project Web site

/project

(shared documents)

/html /images

WebDAV protocol

Figure 2: Collaborative authoring in three different locations

and each Web author uses a different set of authoring tools.

Content authoring with concurrency control can make

content creation efficient and ensure its consistency and

quality. Authoring tools allow content creators to set tem-

plates and create consistent content structures for easy

deployment. There is a wide variety of authoring tools

available on the market, ranging from HTML to XML

editors, many of which have capabilities of facilitating

collaborative authoring.

Document Management Systems

Managing documents—e-mail messages, spreadsheets,

image files, media files, or textual material—traditionally

uses file systems in which documents are organized by

location in hierarchies. The hierarchical structure of fold-

ers maps out the semantic structure of the file system.

However, the hierarchical file system is not without a

problem. For instance, documents can appear only in one

place in the structure, even though they may play different

roles and be relevant to other activities. As Dourish et al.

(2000) described, the ideal document management system

is the kind that provides a logical structure for document

storage (meeting the needs of the system) while support-

ing document interaction (meeting the needs of users).

Many commercial document management systems are

built based on document properties, rather than docu-

ment locations, because document properties are “the

primary, uniform means for organizing, grouping, man-

aging, controlling, and retrieving documents” (Dourish

et al., 2000, p. 142).

A document management system may be a collection

of roughly related systems that perform one or more of

several functions, or a system consisting of a number

of functional modules. Typical document management

systems perform the following functions, though no one

system performs them all:

File naming: allowing long, descriptive file names;


Indexing: assigning or extracting keywords and compil-

ing them into lists;


Multifile document control: presenting an electronic

document consisting of multiple files in various formats

to users as if it were a single entity;

Storage and retrieval: managing the storage and re-

trieval of documents;


“Library” services: performing functions of checking in,

checking out, and versioning documents, auditing trails,

and protecting documents from hacking, theft, and nat-

ural or human disasters;


Workflow management: coordinating tasks, data, and

content creators and developers to make the process

more efficient and effective; and


Presentation/distribution services: deciding the form

and manner in which users view and interact with the

content (Cleveland, 1997).

Increasingly, content developers use conceptual model-

ing methods to design the structure and relationships for

a domain, in which data, documents, and applications are

planned together in a systematic manner. These concep-

tual models sometimes are called “ontologies.” Content-

encoding schemas and application programs are then de-

veloped based on the conceptual models. Such schemas

apply XML syntax and in some cases, the resource de-

scription framework (RDF) syntax (W3C, 1999b), which

permits some inference or reasoning to allow intelligent

agent applications.

CONTENT REPRESENTATION

AND ORGANIZATION

Many Web sites today use representation and organiza-

tion schemes of some sort. Yahoo! has its own category

list that lets users browse its collection of Web sites hi-

erarchically. Amazon.com uses a patented algorithm to

recommend books or other goods based on the query a

user entered for searching. Without a proper represen-

tation and organization of data and documents, it would

have been impossible to provide these functions. Thus, the

purpose of managing Web content is not simply to create

some data and documents and make them available on the

Web; more importantly, it is to createorganizedcontent

so users can interact with it more effectively. Representa-

tion and organization needs to begin with content design

and creation and follow through to the presentation (in-

terface) on the Web. As Web content becomes increasingly

complex and large in scope, several research communities

such as library and information science and computer sci-

ence have been actively studying how to represent and

organize content to make it “machine-understandable”

(W3C, 1999b). “Semantic Web” is a term describing the

activities in this area, which includes a series of stan-

dards under development such asResource Description

Framework (RDF) Schema Language(W3C, 1999b) and

Requirements for a Web Ontology Language(W3C, 2002a).

Semantic Web is the abstract representation of data on

the World Wide Web, based on the RDF standards and

other standards to be defined. According to Berners-Lee

et al. (2001), Semantic Web is “an extension of the current

web in which information is given well-defined meaning,

better enabling computers and people to work in coop-

eration.” It is being developed by the W3C, in collabora-

tion with a large number of researchers and industrial

partners.