Evolving technology is driving the creation of a new business environment. New business relationships, technology requirements and methods for sharing content require the fast, accurate, automated exchange of large volumes of data in multiple formats and in real time. Today, repurposing consists mostly of cutting and pasting since there is no reliable way to automatically retrieve similar types of content. Lack of agreement regarding descriptions of content types also makes aggregation difficult. Consistent metadata will make these processes much more efficient.
Syndication is also a challenge.
Publishers, aggregators and syndicators require knowledge of rights and permissions not only of entire documents, but also of each content component within a document. Today, rights and permissions and all the related details geographic restrictions, time, language, market, format, alterations or restrictive use are investigated and negotiated via phone calls, email, faxes and paper contracts. A standard vocabulary would provide reliability, consistency and some automation to what can be a very haphazard, time consuming, and expensive manual process. Publishers and consumers alike complain that there is no way to find separate pieces of content that were once published together. For instance, articles published in a New York Times special supplement do not carry any usage history information.