Requirements for and Methodology of Content Management Systems

The hype of the term Content Management lets one speculate that it concerns a new technology or mode of operation. That is however not true. Already in the Hellenistic age, the librarian Demetrios of Phaleron of the famous library in Alexandria was assigned to collect all books around the world. The extraordinary achievement accomplished was not only the arisen collection of 400.000 - 700.000 book-rolls but moreover, their systematic cataloguing, the creation of book indices and annotated inventory indices (with declarations, that we would today describe as meta information), as well as a labelling system for a faster identification of works. Based on these innovative considerations, it became also possible that after the fire catastrophe most of the valuable 40.000 destroyed books could be regained.
In contrast to the above, looking at today's approach towards digital information it can be stated that firstly the produced information overload resides unstructured on hard disks and may therefore be lost forever, and that secondly the endeavours to structure information are preceding allthough the crucial methodical requirements are not yet fulfilled for several years. One approach that deals with a structured and systematic handling of content are Content Management Systems (CMS). Within the scope of this workshop we want to address on the one hand the technical requests of Content Management Systems, and on the other hand engage fundamental considerations towards persistent storaging of content. Among other topics, the following questions will be dealt with: how can I delimit CMS from editorial systems or knowledge management systems (KMS)? Why is the separation of content and structure so important? What does XML mean? What are the most important criteria for a suitable CMS?