If it weren't for Tim Berners-Lee and the W3 Commission, it's not certain that they would be any standards in online publishing. The publishing world has been notoriously bad in cooperating to form standards for categorizing and interchanging content. However, one standard gaining acceptance is the XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) for financial data. Deborah Doane, VP Marketing for EDGAR Online, described the business advantages, as well as the technical advantages, of adopting open standards. She explained that having standard formats would create new competition between current providers, but that the advantages of being able to more effectively mine the detailed data in SEC reports (and other financial reports) would allow content publishers to focus on higher-value services. Echoing the comments from the Pricing Session, Deb emphasized the need to focus on adding value via analysis, tools, and consulting in order to retain a premium service at a time when basic data are becoming commmodities.

David Sidman, CEO of Content Directions, described a different standard, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Background on DOIs can be found at his Web site. Basically, by assigning a DOI to a document, image, segment of a document or other "object", a permanent link is maintained to the original object. David even demonstrated the utility of establishing a DOI on oneself! My key takeaway from this session was the ability to use the new DOI multilink feature to provide a link to a selection of related content--a sort of contextual content matching in a box. DOIs are growing in popularity, so this is a space to watch.