About PRISM

What is PRISM?

The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) specification defines an XML metadata vocabulary for managing, aggregating, post-processing, multi-purposing and aggregating magazine, news, catalog, book, and mainstream journal content. PRISM recommends the use of certain existing standards, such as XML, RDF, the Dublin Core, and various ISO specifications for locations, languages, and date/time formats. In addition PRISM provides a framework for the interchange and preservation of content and metadata, a collection of elements to describe that content, and a set of controlled vocabularies listing the values for those elements.

Metadata is an exceedingly broad category of information covering everything from an article's country of origin to the fonts used in its layout. PRISM's scope is driven by the needs of publishers to receive, track, and deliver multi-part content. The focus is on additional uses for the content, so metadata concerning the content's appearance is outside PRISM's scope. PRISM focused on metadata for:

General-purpose description of resources as a whole
Specification of a resource’s relationships to other resources
Definition of intellectual property rights and permissions
Expressing inline metadata (that is, markup within the resource itself).

Today PRISM consists of three specifications. The PRISM Specification, itself, provides definition for the overall PRISM framework. A second specification, the PRISM Aggregator Message (PAM) Schema/DTD, is a standard format for publishers to use for delivery of content to websites, aggregators, and syndicators. PAM is available as an XML DTD and an XML schema (XSD). Both PAM formats provides a simple, flexible model for transmitting content and PRISM metadata. The third, and newest, specification provides an XML schema (XSD) for capture of content usage rights metadata. This Guide to PRISM Usage Rights utilizes the elements found in PRISM’s Usage Rights Namespace to allow users to comprehensively capture and relay rights metadata for text and media content.