The project
D@nte — Advanced digitalisation through new editorial technologies — is an industrial-research and experimental-development project led by Gruppo Giunti Editore together with an ATI of 4 Tuscan SMEs (CUBIT, Centrica, noze, Hyperborea), kicked off in 2010 with a Detailed Executive Plan dated 18 May 2011.
The goal: take Gruppo Giunti — founded in 1956 (with typographic roots dating back to 1840), more than 1,170 employees, market leader in school, children’s, food-and-wine and tourism publishing — from traditional publishing to advanced digital publishing, by integrating new technologies for production, distribution and consumption (web, mobile, e-readers, interactive whiteboards, App stores, “Box D@nte”).
The consortium
- Gruppo Giunti Editore — customer and main driver of the initiative
- CUBIT — University of Pisa + 8 SMEs consortium on wireless / RFID / WSN
- Centrica (Florence) — digital imaging, DAM/DRM, ontology-based knowledge management
- noze — content/document/process management, Web 2.0, system integration, R&D
- Hyperborea — cultural heritage, digital library, archive science, semantic web
noze’s role
noze contributed to the project on three industrial-research and experimental-development workstreams, across the entire editorial production and distribution chain:
1. Integrated Production Environment — DAM on top of Alfresco
The heart of Giunti’s new editorial system. Industrial research on the integration of XML-based systems into the Open Source Enterprise Content Management software Alfresco — at the time excellent for document management but lacking native handling of taxonomies, ontologies, relations and editorial-specific metadata. Experimental development of the DAM (Document & Asset Management) component — the “core” of the system — able to manage and preserve every Giunti digital asset (raw content, work-in-progress, final document) and to interface with the editorial flow and Timone Editoriale modules.
2. Giunti Scuola learning environment
Collaborative, interactive environment for learning, authoring, sharing and disseminating content, information, documents, photos, videos and other digital assets for the Giunti Scuola division. Includes qualitative-feedback mechanisms and content recombination into personalised anthologies. Implemented on the Alfresco core with Open Source Web 2.0 collaborative technologies.
3. SaaS collaborative platform
A multi-application, content-based SaaS architecture for web collaboration and for distributing/serving content and services with customisable templates, inspired by emerging social-networking patterns. A multi-vendor, multi-channel proposal model for cross-market application.
Technologies and approach
Alfresco as the ECM core, extended with XML, taxonomies and ontologies. Semantic Web, editorial workflow, Open Source Web 2.0 collaborative technologies, multi-tenant SaaS architecture. The baseline choice was to commit to fully Open Source technologies, integrating Alfresco with the industrial-research results to build a coherent system from authoring all the way to cross-channel publication.