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Communicating access and usage permissions for online content
Papers: Communicating access and usage permissions for online content, Communicating access and usage permissions for online content (Prince PDF version) [PDF]
The growth in the use of search engines and other aggregation services presents a major challenge to the businesses of traditional content owners. Newspaper publishers in particular rely upon aggregators to generate traffic to their online content, but have viewed with concern the growth in search engine advertising revenue, while their own revenues from the same sources have diminished. Many publishers wish to put content online for marketing purposes, but are put off so doing because they feel unable to control what use is made of that content.
A study during 2006 concluded that a major technical obstacle to the evolution of new commercial models is the lack of adequate standards for content owners to express content access and usage permissions in machine-readable form. Existing conventions, such as the Robots Exclusion Standard, cannot deliver sufficiently nuanced expressions of what aggregators’ systems should or should not do with online content.
A global consortium of commercial publishers across all major sectors (led by the World Association of Newspapers, the European Publishing Council and the International Publishers Association) is funding a year-long project to develop and test a standard approach to communicating access and usage permissions. Called the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), the proposed standard will enable content owners to express in full the terms under which access and usage of online content is permitted and communicate these reliably and efficiently to aggregators’ systems. Building upon existing web and metadata technologies and standards, ACAP will be tested by publishers and aggregators to determine its technical feasibility in a number of real-world use case scenarios.
The presenter will provide an update on progress approximately four months into the project, with details of the various technologies and standards that have been selected for inclusion in the ACAP standard, and will describe the use cases in which these are to be tested.
For further information on ACAP visit http://www.the-acap.org/.
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Francis Cave
Francis Cave Digital Publishing
Francis Cave is an XML consultant based in the UK. He was a founder member of the International SGML/XML Users Group and is currently Chairman of XML UK, the UK XML user group. He is also Chairman of BSI Technical Committee IST/41, which represents the UK in the work of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, and is editor of DSDL Part 9 Namespace- and datatype-aware DTDs.
For more than seven years Francis has been working with EDItEUR on the development and maintenance of a wide range of XML-based communication standards for the book and serials industries worldwide, including the ONIX and EDItX format families. As well as supporting the continuing development of the ONIX for Books product metadata standard, significant work is being done to develop XML-based standards for communication of license terms, with current and potential applications across the whole publishing and media sector. Partly as a result of this work, in 2006 Francis was appointed by the World Association of Newspapers to be Technical Project Manager for the ACAP Project.
Francis has operated a successful freelance XML consultancy business since 1999 and lives in the Surrey Hills with his wife Liz and two teenage children.