That Linked Open Data will act as a future technologie for media companies is a well known thesis. But Wolters Kluwer demonstrates the very real praxis of that. I had the chance to talk to Christian Dirschl, Content Architect at Wolters Kluwer in munich.
Thomas Thurner: Wolters Kluwer has recently appeared as a strong supporter of the Semantic Web community. You are also one of the Use Case partners in the LOD2 project. What is the interest of Wolters Kluwer in the Semantic Web?
Christian Dirschl: The mission of Wolters Kluwer is to be “The Professional’s First Choice”. Our customers are using more and more the Web and its technologies as an environment for their daily work. This includes also new access paths to information like mobiles or tablets. The Semantic Web with its capabilities of using accepted standards on the one hand and being able to add new information and intelligence to the Web on the other hand is a proper and necessary part of this overall development. Wolters Kluwer will help its customers in leveraging this potential by being an innovative and constitutive actor within the community. In the end, we want to offer better products right at the point of need in order to support our customers’ core processes more efficiently.
Thomas Thurner: Wolters Kluwer is one out of 3 Use Case partners in LOD2 – you are the lead of the publishing & media use case – what is this use case all about?
Christian Dirschl: The Publishing & Media Use Case covers three main aspects.
First, we want to find out how Semantic Web technologies and data can enhance our own internal core processes, which we call the Content Supply Chain. The aim is to use Semantic Web standards internally, to access data – especially Open Government Data – from the cloud in order to offer our customers more relevant information in a linked and integrated manner with lower costs than we do it today.
Second, we want to support the further development of the Semantic Web by publishing data into the cloud. We hope to achieve a win-win situation with the community, so that we help the cloud to deal with the legal domain in a more knowledgeable way; but also that our information is widely used and linked to other relevant data sources.
Third, we have to explore future trends in the development of new licensing and business models. The world of the Semantic Web is in this respect fundamentally different from traditional publishing business models and we have to find and implement new ways how best to monetize our assets.
Thomas Thurner: Media companies like Wolters Kluwer have been familiar with traditional approaches and technologies (like taxonomies or XML) to organize content for years. Do you see this as an advantage to make the step towards linked data, or is the semantic web rather a “webby thing”?
Christian Dirschl: First of all, I don’t think that media companies on average are used to taxonomies or XML. There is a wide variety in this area. We at Wolters Kluwer work already a long time with this technology and from a content or data point of view, the Semantic Web is simply a big step forward. So in this respect, it is definitely an advantage to have experience in structured data and metadata.
The challenges lie more in other areas like technology and the mindset of the people, what relevant “information” will look like and where it will come from in the future. The Semantic Web standards are a technological challenge for our business. We are used to adhere to internal and therefore proprietary standards and the shift to these open standards requires a lot of know-how that we are currently developing.
The more fundamental challenge is about a new paradigm of what information is. People are still thinking in isolated products and the publisher being the main delivery channel of information to its customers. The Semantic Web gives the customer himself a lot of freedom of how and what and when he wants to use and consume information.
Thomas Thurner: One obvious advantage of semantic web technologies is to lower costs of data integration efforts by using standards. Which concrete use cases for this approach could you think of in the media industry?
Christian Dirschl: The media industry consists of companies themselves. So data integration issues must be solved as in all other large company as well. But in addition, content and information is our core asset. So we are facing additional challenges, especially because we live in a very dynamic market. We buy companies and content pools and then we sell others again in order to be able to make a comprehensive offering for our customers. With every acquisition, new integration issues come up and the usage of Semantic Web standards help us in managing these issues including keeping the costs in an acceptable range. In addition, more and more different media like mobile and tablets are in use and each of them needs a different shaping of information concerning e.g. granularity of content and metadata structures. Semantic Web standards can support us in all these areas as well.
About Wolters-Kluwer
Wolters Kluwer Deutschland GmbH is part of Wolters Kluwer n.v., a leading global information services and publishing company. The company provides products and services for professionals in the health, tax, accounting, corporate, financial services, legal and regulatory sectors. Wolters Kluwer has annual revenues (2010) of €3.6 billion, employs approximately 19,000 people worldwide and maintains operations in more than 20 European countries, in North America and in Asia Pacific. Wolters Kluwer is headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
