GNPortal Content Acquisition System Benefits

The power and benefit of GNPortal is perhaps best illustrated by an example:

A letter to the editor is a common newspaper requirement that easily demonstrates the strengths of GNPortal. The parts of a letter to the editor are: the name and contact information of the sender, the body of the letter, and generally a subject. The subject might be a limited number of subjects such as national, international, the economy, etc. Or the subject might be free form, or perhaps both. The writer might be invited to reference a previously published article.

A newspaper may want to accept a letter to the editor through a website and validate that the person sending the letter has given real information about himself or herself. If the information checks out, then route the letter to the correct editor for review, editing and publication.

To implement the web-based letter-to-the-editor, system management personnel describe the information that comprises the letter (subject, name, contact info, reference) in an XML Schema. GNPortal can automatically construct a web page or form from that description that validates the letter’s subject information.

As part of a mashup, the writer’s name and address could be validated against one of the many public databases and indicate, when the letter is reviewed for editing, that the name and address pass auto-validation.

The letter can then be edited as part of the normal production cycle and published. Further automated processing can format the letter into multiple formats for different pubs, the web, and other presentation formats.

Tera CMSA allows all of the content that will be published to reside in the same place. So, the letter to the editor, even though it came via web, can be stored along with keyboard-generated content produced by reporters, content that is generated by data collection programs, wire stories, graphics, video, etc.

In this example, GNPortal, which was written using Tera CMSA, allows newspaper support people to describe the Letter-to-the-Editor via an XML schema. Using that description, GNPortal created a form for web users to enter the letter. A Tera CMSA application, which might have been written by a third party, read the definition and then validated the name and address from public databases. The editorial page editor then knew the writer was authentic and concentrated on the worthiness of the content.