EP2010 - A Strategic European Study on the Future of Electronic Publishing Towards 2010

Our presentation gives an outlook on some of the main results of a strategic European study entitled “EP2010 – The Future of Electronic Publishing Towards 2010”. The paper puts forward the thesis that, driven by the emerging knowledge economy, “traditional” publishing industries will have to face the technological and economic challenges of knowledgeenhanced publishing: Novel publishing objects will provide different information layers (adapters) including an underlying knowledge structure to enable value adding (in a very broad sense) along various steps in the publishing workflow. We introduce the concept of “smart content” to define, along the digital content value chain, the major technological challenges and market scenarios for the future of the electronic publishing sector in the knowledge economy. Smart content objects will, among other properties, be personalised, adaptable, evolvable, unobtrusive, interoperable and ubiquitous. A proposed research map including foundational research, application-oriented research on the publishing and knowledge management workflow and integrative research, e.g. on semantic interoperability, reflects the needs of the publishing industries regarding the paradigm change from traditional “canned” publishing towards knowledge based publishing in 2010.