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October 10 - RivCom at IfraExpo, Amsterdam
October 10, IfraExpo, Amsterdam
RivCom's consultants Tony Stewart and Jay Cousins will speak on the topic "AdsML is Live!" at IfraExpo in Amsterdam in October.
IfraExpo is the world's largest annual newspaper conference. The event, which takes place from 9-11 October, brings together decision makers from media houses and daily newspapers along with their main suppliers from the pre-media, press and distribution sectors. For more than 30 years, IfraExpo has been the launching pad for new developments and technology in newspapers and related media.
Key RivCom consultants Tony Stewart and Jay Cousins, who serve as Chair and Vice-Chair, respectively, of the AdsML Technical Working Group, will speak at a special IfraExpo session entitled "AdsML is Live". They will report on the current state of development of the AdsML Framework, a suite of XML-based standards for ecommerce communications which supports the buying, selling, producing, delivery and payment of advertisements. The session includes an overview of work to date, case studies of current AdsML pilot and production projects, and discussions of the planning and decisions that are required when starting up an AdsML project.
"AdsML is Live!" is scheduled for Tuesday October 10, from 14.00 to 16.00, in Room C at IfraExpo in the RAI (the Amsterdam convention centre). Admission is free to IfraExpo attendees.
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August 4 - RivCom support for the Los Angeles Times
August 4, Los Angeles
RivCom has been engaged by the Los Angeles Times, a leading American newspaper, to provide consultancy services in support of a major internal IT systems project.
The Los Angeles Times is developing a service oriented architecture which will enable its advertisement booking and production systems to communicate with each other via XML messages. Rather than use a proprietary format for these messages, the LA Times has decided that the messages should be based on the industry-standard AdsML Framework. They have asked RivCom to provide targeted consultancy services in order to ensure that the LA Times developers make best use of the AdsML standard and do so in as efficient a manner as possible. RivCom consultants Tony Stewart and Jay Cousins led the development of the AdsML Framework, and have provided similar consulting services to other news and media organizations including News International, Associated Newspapers and Karkimedia.
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July 12 - RivCom support for the AdFast artwork delivery service
July 12, London
RivCom's Jay Cousins will provide AdsML-related consultancy to AdFast, one of the foremost artwork delivery services in the United Kingdom.
AdFast was set up to provide a single Internet portal that allows users to submit artwork to all subscribing titles using one simple mechanism .AdFast now has a traffic rate of approx. 1,250,000 file transfers a year. The AdFast system currently uses XML messages in a proprietary format to convey information about the artwork files. The group has decided to switch to the industry-standard AdsML format, and in doing so, to take advantage of additional AdsML capabilities which will allow publishers to streamline their relevant production workflows.
RivCom's Jay Cousins, in his role as Vice-Chair of the AdsML Technical Working Group, is working closely with AdFast to customise their use of the messages in the AdsML Framework while ensuring interoperatibility with other AdsML implementations. Jay's involvement in the AdFast project is expected to span three significant sub-projects, from July 2006 until autumn 2007.
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July 11 - RivCom to co-develop the IPTC schema generator
July 11, London
RivCom and a partner company, CNet Svenska, have been hired by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) to jointly develop a schema generator which will enable IPTC teams developing their family of standards to generate the necessary schemas automatically once they have done the main creative work.
Currently, the IPTC News Architecture, which applies to all of the new IPTC standards, defines two different levels of features: the Core Conformance Level with basic features, and the Power Conformance Level with extended features. These features are formalized in two different XML Schema documents which share a great deal of overlapping content, but at the same time, the Core schema is not a simple subset of the Power schema. The result is that any changes to the underlying model that are shared by both schemas need to be made in parallel to the two schemas, and both schemas need to be carefully controlled to ensure that they continue to conform to the underlying principles. This increases both the cost of future schema maintenance, and the risk that mistakes will occur.
The Schema Generator project will eliminate these problems, by enabling both the Core and Power conformance level schemas to be generated automatically from a single source "Master" document according to a set of defined rules. The project includes both defining the format for the "Master" document, and creating the stylesheets and scripts which will enable the necessary schemas to be generated from that document.
Over the past two years, RivCom and CNet Svenska have collaborated on a series of consultancy projects for the IPTC to support the development of its News Architecture, which serves as the foundation of all of the new IPTC standards -- including NewsML version 2. RivCom consultant, Daniel Rivers-Moore, was the editor of the original NewsML standard in 2000.
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RivCom impressed us with their ability to combine technical expertise with a clear focus on meeting our requirements.
