Optimization of Processes in Multimedia Content Publishing: A Proposal for Architecture Design

摘要

Organizations in the publishing field accumulate large amounts of data and store it in different forms of knowledge databases. In the publishing field specifically, various multimedia content presentation is involved, requiring support for contemporary e-book standard formats (e-Pub) as well as traditional standard formats such as HTML, PDF, and others. Publishing organizations must support the same content presentation in various formats in order to meet the needs of their increasingly demanding clients. However, business (and organizational) processes in publishing in the presented case study have little IT support and almost no automation. Successful business flow and a competitive advantage for publishing organizations, especially for SMEs, requires a holistic solution for the optimization of publishing processes, including data/knowledge acquisition, data/knowledge aggregation and the creation of new knowledge based on existing data. Although partial IT solutions are available and can be used to support individual steps in the publishing process, they do not come in an out-of-the box solutions, suitable for adequate publishing processes automation and optimization. Two basic challenges regarding existing solutions available on the market are: (1) they do not provide support for automation or semi automation in the publishing processes, and (2) they are expensive and consequently not acceptable for SMEs. This paper is focused on analyzing publishing work processes and its quality aspects, addressing the automation of all possible process steps: especially the optimization of acquisition, aggregation and building of multimedia content for any device. In addition, a solution built on open source components is proposed as well, supporting the presentation of content in different published formats. Based on a case study, we present the solution's architectural design and analyze standards and technologies, providing an acceptable solution for SME's from an economical point of view, optimizing its work processes to the largest possible extent. A renewed publishing process is proposed and future research directions are also discussed.