PAMW is a New Schema to Automate Harvesting Web Magazine Content in PRISM XML

Alexandria, Virginia - IDEAlliance^® is announcing the posting of a new PRISM-based XML schema for public comment. The industry comment period for the PAMW Specifications began March 24 and will close on May 15, 2014. Comments will be resolved during the IDEAlliance nextPub™ Technical Meeting in New York City on June 10, 2014.

About PAMW

PAMW is the PRISM Aggregator Message for Web Content. PAMW is the first new PRISM-based XML content encoding message to be published since the original PRISM Aggregator Message was published in 2004.

PAMW was initially developed by a technical team from Time, Inc. to assist with their project to harvest Web magazine content as PRISM XML. The team began the project by working with the PAM markup that is used to send magazine content to aggregators. However they quickly found that the use case for PAM was significantly different from the use case of automating the harvesting, archiving, reuse and redistribution of Web content. Using PAM, the team could not achieve more than a 60% success rate in automating the content harvest process. When failures were analyzed, it became clear that a new schema should be developed particularly for this purpose and the PAMW initiative was born. The PAMW schema that was developed by the IDEAlliance PRISM Working Group effort now supports automated harvest and tagging of online magazine content with better than a 95% degree of success.

PAMW Use Cases

As PAMW development was completed by the PRISM Working Group of IDEAlliance, the scope of the use cases grew and now include:

• Automated harvest of Web and Mobile content in an XHTML and PRISM Metadata format
• Distribute content to aggregators, syndicators and other online and mobile revenue stream
• Establish publisher DAM Systems to use for editorial research
• Establish publisher DAM Systems to create new content by reusing content originally published on websites
• Establish publisher systems to manage usage rights for online and mobile content
• Provide a richly encoded alternative to static PDF replicas for EPUB2-based magazine newsstands

According to Dianne Kennedy, VP of Digital and Emerging Technology at IDEAlliance, “PAMW was initiated to enable the automated harvest of online magazine content in an XML format with PRISM metadata. But since that time, PAMW has come to fulfill a broad number of emerging new use cases centered around the new online and mobile publishing channels. PAMW represents a significant step in the evolution of our PRISM Specifications and provides a new solution for publishers who are struggling to manage both print and online content and to monetize that content in new ways across digital channels."

The Public Comment Process

The PAMW Draft consists of a PAMW Markup Specification, the PAMW Guide and a set of PAMW XML schemas. All can be downloaded for review and comment from www.prismstandard.org. Comments can be posted by May 15, 2014 on Google Docs or send comments by email to Dianne Kennedy.