The concept of content enrichment is very important for publishers to grasp to achieve true content agility.  Content enrichment deals with moving content from its current state of programmatic and semantic capability to a higher level through the application of enhanced structure and additional metadata.  Figure 2:  Content Enrichment, below, illustrates a theoretical continuum of states that content may exist within.  It begins on the left with mostly-unstructured content such as a print-ready PDF with ever increasing amounts of structure and enriched content structures as it moves to the right.

This enrichment staging concept allows for several major features:

• The belief that content is only unstructured or archive quality is dispelled

• Highly desired, more valuable content may warrant the investment in higher-stages while lesser-used content remains in a lower stage.

• This can be aligned with current human resource, budget and/or projected ROI for that content

• The system can operate with content at all stages, simply providing different views of different content based on its stage of enrichment – from PDF to Archive XML.

It should be noted that many content managers struggle with the degree and cost of structural and semantic tagging for their content.  A traditional relational database with its columns and rows makes taking a library of content from one state of enrichment to the next difficult – often requiring that new columns be added and all content be advanced to the new level, which can be cost prohibitive. As such, and given the importance of supporting XML content, XML metadata and content enrichment, EVN proposes a system that stores all content in an XML repository designed specifically for the storage, manipulation and use of XML.

Further, while content is most often thought of today as a whole book, issue, etc. as the digital revolution continues, it will be viewed in a much more topical way: first, by chapter, article, etc, but eventually by topic, task, etc. the proposed system supports that migration.