PART I | Semantic Web Technology and the Publishing World: What Can They Offer Each Other?

Bob DuCharme, Solutions Architect, TopQuadrant

As publishers watch print revenue decline, they're drawn to various aspects of semantic technologies. "Semantic search" vendors have convinced some that it may be a magic wand that connects more content to more customers, but often with greater dependencies on proprietary technology than on standards-based approaches.

Other publishers see better metadata management as a key to their future. In addition to helping customers and production staff find the right content more quickly, better metadata reduces the time and costs of determining what rights a publisher has to use which content in which media—a growing problem in the industry.

The semantic world has the standards, techniques, and tools (in that order) to provide this, but talk of blank nodes and open world assumptions frightens off many publishers. Examining aspects of how both sides look at the same issues from different angles can help both address those issues better. For example:

• Publishers see overlapping, confusing metadata standards; ontology standards can help to sort and find the right connections between these standards.
• Academics develop ontologies paying more attention to development techniques than to the actual use of the ontologies; publishers' content is real data that can contribute more to their business with better ontologies.
• The relational and XML worlds tell publishers that data management starts with fixed schemas; the semantic web world offers them the schema flexibility that they need to accommodate different sets of metadata from different sources.
• Publishers' long experience with XML and SGML has taught them how to think about data structures that don't fit into relational tables.
• Newer, higher-level semantic web standards such as SKOS and RDFa help connect semantic web theory to publishing practice.

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PART II | Added Value Services of Financial Newspapers with Semantic Technology

Luca Scagliarini, VP Strategy & Business Development, Expert System

Il Sole 24 Ore is one of the leading daily newspaper publishers in Italy, providing news and information services about politics, the economy, legislation and Italian and international financial markets.

Semantic technologies are used to support Il Sole 24 Ore in three important aims:

1. To increase the monetization of content by both enhancing the relevance of information presented to our customers, and improving the effectiveness of our SEO and SEM activities.
2. To improve the user experience on our portal http://www.sole24ore.com/, through the implementation of innovative solutions.
3. To introduce new efficiencies in our publishing activities through automation in the analysis and classification of content.

Sole 24 Ore efforts in these three areas brought value on both sides of the business case equation through both revenue enhancement and cost efficiencies.