Interwoven Pledges to Support New Metadata Standard for Publishing and Web Applications.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 9, 2001

Open Standard Means Faster and Less Expensive Integrations,

Easier Content Exchange, and More Freedom in Choosing

Best-of-Breed Solutions

Interwoven, Inc. (Nasdaq:IWOV), the leading provider of enterprise-class content management software, announced today that it will support the emerging PRISM 1.0 standard for reading and writing metadata. PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata) defines an XML standard for describing content, its origins, relations, and reuse rights. Other vendors supporting this emerging standard include: Adobe in the creation space, Artesia in the asset management space, Kinecta in the exchange space, and ATG, a key vendor of online customer management and electronic commerce software.

Originally intended to help the publishing industry move to the Web, PRISM has attracted broader attention because of the increasing demand to leverage content across multiple Web initiatives in multiple forms. Metadata (data which describes content) is key to a company's content infrastructure, because it supplements the human-readable content with machine-readable metadata which can automate tasks that have been labor intensive in the past.

"A Web content repository without metadata is like a library without an index," said Jack Jia, senior vice president of engineering at Interwoven. "Even more than the users, the staff would not know where to put things and find them again. Metadata is the key to getting machines to put content away and find it when needed -- unlocking the 80% of an organization's information that does not reside in database."

Key benefits of the new specification include:

-- Better personalization, search, navigation, and content re-use through rich,
descriptive data

-- Lower integration costs by using a standard format (compared to dealing with
multiple vendor-specific formats)

-- Easy importation of metadata from creation tools and from other repositories

"We were delighted to work with Interwoven's metadata experts during the development of the PRISM specification," said Hank Skorny, senior director of Internet strategy and alliances at Adobe. "PRISM's use of SML and RDF gracefully connects with our use of these same open standards in Adobe's metadata framework, which facilitates rapid integration of content metadata in network publishing applications."

"We're extremely committed to open standards and we are very active participants in the standards committees of many technologies," said Joe Chung, co-founder and CTO of ATG. "We're continuously innovating and working to get our innovations into the standards as well as adhering to them as they solidify. Having a standard format for representing detailed metadata on content items makes our personalization and search functionality much more powerful and we think that PRISM looks like the next step in solidifying this."

Up to now, metadata was often discarded when content moved between systems or organizations. It would often be recreated at a later stage of production, affecting quality and raising costs. Interwoven and the other PRISM supporters believe a common interoperable standard and an open process for its ongoing development will drive interoperability by allowing metadata to be created manually or automatically at any stage of production.

PRISM was developed in a collaborative process by representatives from over 20 publishing and technology companies. A major task performed by the working group was to survey the broad array of already-existing metadata standards, and recommend the appropriate combination of previous work, along with the minimum of new work needed to meet the needs of the publishers and other large-scale information distributors and consumers.

About PRISM

The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) standard, an initiative hosted by IDEAlliance, is developing a framework for the interchange and preservation of publishable content and metadata. PRISM also provides a set of controlled vocabularies with which to describe the content being interchanged. www.prismstandard.org.

About Interwoven

Interwoven, Inc. (Nasdaq:IWOV) is the world's leading provider of enterprise-class content management software. Its solutions control the development, management and deployment of Web content and are the de facto standard for over 500 Global 1000 companies including General Electric, General Motors and Cisco Systems. Interwoven teams with the leading best-of-breed eBusiness application providers to provide customers an end-to-end platform for eBusiness. For more information on the fastest growing software company in Silicon Valley and its proven XML-based solutions, visit the Interwoven Web site at www.interwoven.com.