Typical Projects

Electronic Media Consultants Ltd area of business can be described as "Document Computing", i.e. projects, consultancy and development of systems that automate, assemble, style and manage information components and documents during the information's edit and delivery lifecycle.

All of these projects utilise "structured information" using a WWW consortium standard known as XML. This is EMCL's prime area of expertise (XML is a variant of SGML: which we have been working with for many years).

With the rise of XML, companies and institutions outside publishing now utilise XML as an ideal format for data interchange in Government and B2B systems. EMCL has provided consultancy and development expertise to these "XML adopters" to ensure that they maximise the benefit that XML can provide.

Typically, customers who require such a service hold their information in high value and typically deal with either a high volume of data or data that is complex.

Work performed can broadly be broken down into:

• Consultancy – providing advice, technical evaluation of tools and technical designs, attending meetings, creating formal specifications for approaches to development and for new systems:
• Project Management – developing project plans for customer projects and monitoring and controlling progress against plan:
• Document Analysis – performing high-level multiple document-type analysis, low level analysis, creation of analysis reports, creation of schemas.
• Development – developing prototype systems, developing system components, integrating small parts of the system or off-the-shelf tools to the new system, developing XSLT and XSL-FO stylesheets to convert and display the information
• Training – training in my areas of expertise or on the systems that are developed as part of the project;
• Testing – supporting the testing of the system.

Typically, the system involved will be developed to:

• control the creation and management of text, hyperlinks and supporting graphic data (i.e. a document management system);
• provide advanced delivery capabilities to bring the data to an end-user (e.g. a dynamic web site or print engine); or to
• exchange business or eGovernment information between users, systems and software components on the Internet/Intranet using XML messaging.

For larger "mission critical" systems, Electronic Media Consultants Ltd will work with developers within the customer organisation to create a system that can be developed and supported by the customer.