Award will fund development of Web-based publishing system

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A. Sue Weisler

RIT’s Frank E. Gannett Building is home to the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences.

RIT was selected as one of 34 universities in the world to receive an HP Labs Innovation Research Award, designed to encourage open collaboration with HP Labs, HP’s central research arm.

RIT faculty and student researchers will work on a research initiative focused on developing a Web-based publishing system to gather content from online repositories such as wikis and blogs and transforming the content into well-designed printed documents.

The Open Publishing Lab at RIT is spearheading the research. The lab is a cross-disciplinary center dedicated to researching and developing innovative, open source applications for publishing across various media. Based in RIT’s School of Print Media, the Open Publishing Lab brings together faculty and students from numerous disciplines including print media, industrial design, graphic design, information technology and software engineering.

Frank Cost, associate dean of RIT’s College of Imaging Arts and Sciences and co-director of the Printing Industry Center at RIT, is the co-author and principal investigator of the winning proposal titled, “An Automated Framework for Collecting, Tagging, Transforming, and Publishing Web Repository Content to Unified Print Layouts.” Patricia Albanese, Gannett Center for Integrated Publishing Sciences Distinguished Professor in RIT’s School of Print Media, is the co-principal investigator and Matt Bernius, professor in RIT’s School of Print Media, serves as a researcher.

“This project will generate discoveries about methodologies for tagging content and metadata when gathering diverse asset types into print documents such as books,” says Cost. “Our cross-repository focus will create knowledge about integrating document services across a wide range of already established publishing platforms. The output of this research will be an open source publishing system that can be used to monetize a wealth of content that already exists via digital print service.”

HP reviewed more than 450 proposals from 200 universities in 28 countries.