The History of Digital Publishing: SGML to XML, Knowledge Graphs and Rules in the AI Era

In our latest webinar, Propylon Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Sean McGrath, discussed his long career in digital publishing.  Beginning in the 1980s, Sean’s discovery of SGML inspired a lifelong passion for managing text in the online space, leading to a specialization in the world of rule-makers and rule-takers – the producers and key consumers of the laws, regulations and standards that make up the fabric of our societies.  In this interview spanning successive generations of technological development, Sean reviewed how the shifts in document management have revolutionized content creation, storage, and retrieval, especially in complex environments like legal publishing. He discussed the impact of desktop publishing technologies in the 1980s which allowed organizations to self-produce high-quality documents.  Sean highlighted the significance of knowledge graphs in modern-day content management, particularly for rule-makers and rule-takers.