ABSTRACT
Advances in publishing technologies have unshackled information that has been imprisoned within proprietary publishing application documents. 'Sharing' information is no longer limited to cutting and pasting blocks of text from one document to another, often requiring an additional conversion process. Publishing is moving toward 'sharing' in the truest form of the word - actually reusing content stored as objects within a database. Instead of mere characters grouped as words, the text is actually 'intelligent' - that is, it 'knows' and identifies to the system what topic is covered within it. It also 'knows' what kind of text block it is (body, title, list, etc.) and its appropriate relationship with surrounding text blocks, thanks to document and content structuring. This chapter focuses on transforming imprisoned, isolated content into portable, contextual building blocks of optimized data and the subsequent management of the content object repository database.
