IDEAlliance Featured in XML and Web Services Unleashed

XML and Web Services Unleashed covers a wide range of XML-related technologies.  This book, designed for the intermediate to advanced developer, provides an overview of two IDEAlliance Specifications— PRISM and ICE.  XML and Web Services Unleashed is reviewed in the book review section of this issue of XML Files.

In XML and Web Services Unleashed, IDEAlliance is described as a member organization that promotes the development and use of user-driven standards for the publishing industry. IDEAlliance (http://www.idealliance.org) is the host organization for numerous XML-based e-business standards for publishing. In addition, IDEAlliance serves as the host organization for both the ICE and PRISM specifications.

Chapter 13 of XML and Web Services Unleashed provides descriptions of both PRISM and ICE.  Definitions of terms and usage examples (complete with code samples) are provided for each.  Code samples from this text can be found at www.samspublishing.com.

About PRISM

"PRISM is the Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata. It is an extensible XML metadata vocabulary designed to facilitate the multipurposing, aggregating, and syndicating, personalizing, and postprocessing of any kind of content. PRISM is a standardized metadata vocabulary developed by publishers to describe all kinds of published content. Examples of PRISM content types include advertisements, articles, books, catalogs, e-books, home pages, journals, magazines, news, interviews, and even cartoons."

About ICE

This text defines ICE in terms of a much simpler syndication protocol called RSS.  "RSS is a simple mechanism for enabling the syndication of lightweight content. RSS was designed to be simple to use and inexpensive to implement. Although RSS has proven quite useful for the syndication of free content, RSS remains limited in its ability to enforce business rules in the content syndication environment. To fill this role, a second, more robust syndication protocol, Information and Content Exchange (ICE), was developed by industry content providers and software vendors. ICE was developed to automate the negotiation of subscription characteristics and to address the need to automate scheduled, reliable, secure redistribution of any content for publishers and for non-commercial content providers."

The Difference Between PRISM and ICE

Because both PRISM and ICE have something to do with publishing, and because both are IDEAlliance specifications, people often confuse the two.  XML and Web Services Unleashed makes a point to clarify the differences:  "The ICE protocol manages and automates syndication relationships and the managed, scheduled transfer of content. ICE should not be confused with PRISM. They are not the same. PRISM provides an industry-standard metadata vocabulary to describe content assets. This vocabulary can work with ICE to automate content reuse and syndication processes, but it is not a syndication protocol. PRISM is a discovery mechanism and enables us to select content that will be syndicated using ICE. There is a natural synergy between ICE and PRISM. ICE provides the protocol for syndication processes, and PRISM provides a description of the resource being syndicated."