ABSTRACT
One of the fundamentals of the present information society is cross-media publishing, which refers to the process of reusing information across multiple output media without having to rewrite it for distinct purposes. Given a repository with information stored in a media-independent way, a smart publishing system can deliver it concurrently on different platforms without much human intervention. This strategy of create once, publish everywhere, going back to Ted Nelson’s famous Xanadu project (founded 1960) and restated by contemporary authors (Tsakali & Kaptsis, 2002) seems to be the logical answer to the demands of the still-growing range of output devices, as Web PCs, WAP phones, handheld PDAs, and TV set-top boxes. It requires that digital information be well structured, divided into relatively small components, and enriched with metadata, thus improving identification and retrieval for reuse and allowing adaptation and personalization through rule-based aggregation and formatting. Such information that is decomposed, versatile, usable, and wanted will be referred to as content. Reuse is attractive to maximize the return of investment. However, most of the strategies to achieve that purpose require special, highly controlled procedures for creating content. This chapter explores an alternative approach for reusing existing
content that has not been created explicitly for reuse. It is based on the natural controlling mechanism of genre, which appears to direct a great deal of our content production.
