Content Development in

the New Publisher’s

world;

Beyond Web 2.0:

The semantic web

Guy Van Peel

Santander 10 July 2008

Wolters Kluwer: Profile

Global information services and publishing company

Leading positions in core markets: health, tax, accounting, corporate,

financial services, legal, and regulatory

Revenues of €3.4 billion, with almost 50% from online

Market Capitalization approx €5.5 billion

Euronext listed (AEX index)

Approximately 19,500 employees in more than 33 countries

The Professional’s First Choice

Provide the information, tools, and solutions to help

professionals make their most critical decisions effectively

and improve their productivity

Professional Publishing is undergoing significant change

Less about “titles” and more about delivering information in context

Opportunities for exploiting the “Long Tail” of professional publishing

Publishing is less about print and increasingly about technology

From “(our) content is king” towards “content as a commodity”

Metadata drive the development of a better online experience

Incredible explosion of content, driven by access to professional tools

Increasingly, the ‘mystique’ of publishing is eliminated: Consumers will source

their own content, produce it and consume it without (direct) involvement of

traditional publisher

Publishing operations are increasingly centered on technical solutions, supply

chain logistics and process improvement

Rapid change also requires change in workforce capabilities

Also technology development is undergoing fundamental changes because of the

“The Network Effect”

Pervasiveness of Content.

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5

Search

wiki

Rss-aggreation

portal

blog

Wf-software

community

paper

Email

Practise mgt.

Findability ; interoperability ; persistency

•“to become spread throughout all parts of”; as in Spring pervaded the air.

What does it all mean for us?

What we did the 15 years behind us:

— Everybody his own SGML/XML DTD

— Describing content structure

— Prescriptive model for creating consistent digital content stores

— Purpose: build our propietary content models using industry standard language to describe them

— Benefit: structured content for publishing on print and electronic media “under our control”

What we’ll do in the next “x” years:

— Shared resources on the web force

towards interoperable content formats

— Describing content meaning

(semantics)

— Descriptive models that capture the

reality of diversity

— Purpose: aggregate heterogeneous

sources

— Benefit: structured but less

homogeneous content can be “mashed

up” to create new user experiences

In the midst of change…

Spotlight on Semantic…

…Web

…Technologies

…Publishing

Beyond Web 2.0

Web 2.0: a mixed bag of concepts and technologies are transform the online experience

— Communities; social networks

— User Generated Content: wiki’s, blogs, self-publishing (LuLu)

— Publishers embracing the “Freemium” business model

— Mashups: information and presentation are being separated in ways that allow for novel forms of reuse.

Web 3.0 : Semantic Web & Semantic Technologies

— Idea originates from Tim Berners Lee; his ambition: make it possible for computers to “interpret” and “act on” what is available on the web

— Achieving this ambitious goal will require technologies based upon W3C standards

http://www.suniljohn.com/blog/

Technology uptake

Web 2.0: at “Peak of Inflated Expectation” – visible everywhere

Web 3.0: still in “Technology Trigger” phase – some early implementers -

acknowledged technology standards but immature tooling

Source: Gartner

The Web goes “semantic”

Semantic Web = a “web of data” or “web of meaning” instead of “a web of

documents”

— The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web and not its replacement.

— (meta)data with “understood” meaning will add context to search

— therefore promise to improve search result relevancy significantly (precision)

(From WikiPedia) Semantic publishing on the Web or semantic web publishing refers to publishing information as data objects using a semantic web language or as documents with explicit semantic markup. Semantic publication is intended for computers to understand the structure and even the meaning of the published information, making information search and data integration more efficient.

Mature Semantic Technologies’ standards from

the W3C to support the new paradigm

Semantic technology encodes meanings separately from data and content files, and separately from application code.

Descriptive technologies are based upon standards and notations like Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL), and the data-centric, customizable Extensible Markup Language (XML).

These technologies are combined in order to provide descriptions that supplement or replace the content of Web documents.

The machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to the content, i.e. to describe the structure of the knowledge we have about that content.

In this way, a machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful results and facilitating automated information gathering and research by computers.

Source: Semantic Technology Primer (Semantic Technology Conference)

Source: WikiPedia

Wolters Kluwer working on a better user

experience – using semantics in search

With objective of improving the customer experience:

— Introducing “Semantic Search”

Users Expect Search to Fulfill Specific Tasks – more than only Content-Retrieval

Users Expect Search Engines to Interpret

Their Intent

Use of semantic technologies will also allow for integration of

cross-jurisdiction sources: e.g. Cadmium-law

WKB:Brons

WKI:CLDB

“CountryEquivalant”

relation

equivalent

equivalent

Wolters Kluwer LTRE is building capabilities and

skills in using semantic technologies

Developing modular Ontologies (RDF / OWL /SKOS) for rich “data

integration” across the heterogeneous legacy systems of our local

business units…

Content management focus will move from proprietary “medium-neutral” formats for single source publishing towards open

standards for the collaborative and semantic web.

Content development focus will go to adding value through metadata and semantics, heavily supported by automated

processes.

Questions?

Thank You!