Alexandria, VA – August 2, 2007 - PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata), an IDEAlliance Working Group, today announces the availability of the new PRISM 2.0 Specifications for industry comment.  The PRISM 2.0 Specifications can be downloaded from http://www.prismstandard.org/specifications/2.0/.
In 1999, IDEAlliance founded the PRISM Working Group to address the emerging requirements by publishers to utilize standardized metadata to facilitate content management and aggregation as well as to facilitate search .  Since that time the PRISM metadata framework has been broadly implemented by both magazine and journal publishers. PRISM 2.0 is the first major revision in the specification since its initial release in 2001.  This major revision of PRISM addresses the new requirements for publishers and media companies to deliver content in an online multimedia environment, as well as in print.
According to Lee Vetten, McGraw-Hill Business Information Group‘s Co-Chair of the PRISM Working Group, “PRISM 2.0 heralds a new generation for PRISM.  Today’s magazine publishers have made a dramatic shift to delivering eMedia-based content online as well as traditional print magazines.  The development of PRISM 2.0 reflects the commitment of the PRISM Working Group to mirror today’s new publishing models in the specification.”
One of the major changes in PRISM 2.0 is the inclusion of a new compliance profile for PRISM XMP.   Until this time, the use of PRISM metadata was limited to the XML / RDF environment.  Now the new PRISM XMP profile (profile three), provides publishers with the capability to embed PRISM metadata directly into multimedia objects that are so critical to magazine publishing in the online environment.
Dianne Kennedy, IDEAlliance Vice President of Publishing Technologies comments, "Based on a series of focus groups conducted during 2006, we have undertaken an aggressive update of the PRISM Specification to address content that, for the first time, appears online before it is cast in print.  In addition we have focused on extending PRISM to address many more media formants and have redesigned and enhanced our controlled vocabularies to provide for more sophisticated metadata encoding based on delivery media, presentation format and genre.
Public comments are invited from July 15, 2007 until September 15, 2007.  A series of Webinar-based Spec overviews will be held during that time.  See www.prismstandard.org to sign up.  Comments will be resolved and PRISM 2.0 will be finalized at the September PRISM meeting hosted by U.S. News and World Report in Washington, D. C.