CM Pros Fall 2006 Summit: Content Management and the World Enterprise

XML offers a powerful model for the creation of content and can offer real savings over traditional methods of creating, managing, localizing and publishing information. Unfortunately the alphabet soup of acronyms often overwhelms newcomers as well as seasoned professionals. Organizations may miss out on some of the benefits the community has made available or make decisions that negatively impact their processes. While the XML community continues to evolve and address bigger challenges in localization many potential beneficiaries don't realize that they could have much to gain using the work of this community within their own organizations as they develop their strategies for improving the content creation process.

This presentation will give participants a road map to understand why they should be interested in XML and a guide to the XML-related localization standards. It will start with XML itself, providing a feel for why this technology is becoming so popular and what challenges need to be addressed to use it. This will briefly discuss the role of XML in authoring, managing and publishing information. We will pay particular attention here to the separation of content and formatting and what this means to traditional approaches to creating content. The role of Unicode, schemas, and XML rendering technologies will be included in this discussion in straightforward and clear way without delving deeply into too much technical detail.

The next portion of the introduction will discuss how using XML changes the localization process, including a basic introduction to the problems the XML community have succeeded in addressing with a guide to standards that are widely in use today. Some of these include XLIFF, TMX, and TBX as well as XML and some of its related standards. Again, the focus will not be on the technical details but instead on the high-level problems these standards address.

Newer technologies will then be discussed and what role these will play in addressing the localization issues facing organizations today. Some of the highlighted technologies will include SRX, GMX (GILT metrics standard), XML:TM, TBX Link and OLIF.

By the end of the presentation participants should have a strong feel for the issues they can expect to encounter as XML becomes more and more prevalent in the content production process. With this knowledge, participants will be able to better understand the tools available, better plan their content production strategy, and perhaps gain interest in participating in the larger communities that are helping to address the issues we encounter in our own organizations.