1. News the New Way
Semantics in the Driver’s Seat

2. Philip Dudchuk
Head of Semantic Production Department,
RIA Novosti

3. 1941
Founded in the beginning of the WW2, RIA Novosti was
initially a news agency reporting on the situation at the
war front

4. First news websites looked
like simple news feeds

5. Metadata rules the world of news
• News metadata gets right content to right departments of the
customer
• Metadata locates the reported events
• Metadata enables vertical products focused on selected areas
(banking, automotive, government)

6. Boom of platforms in late 2000s

7. 2011: Need in a common Semantic Publishing Platform
• Build and manage a common news ontology and
vocabularies for all products and news websites
• Generate metadata for both news items and articles on
websites
• Aggregate content and metadata for further use in end-
user applications (websites and mobile apps)

8. Evolution of the Publishing Process

9. News Ontology

10. Impact 1: Broadcasting News with Semantic Metadata
Filtering news content by triple queries at the customer’s end
(via API):
• content about any oil & gas company
• content about any employee of any public body in a
given region of Russia
• content about any event going to happen in my city
Common metadata for newswire and web content allow to
blend free and paid content into new products (news archive)

11. Impact 2: Adaptive Content of Websites
My ria.ru
• Locating the user and filtering the content by region
• Gathering user interests and filtering content by
entities and topics

12. Impact 3: Non-traditional Aggregations and Analytics
Putting together news metadata with external content
• summer forest fires
• juvenile delinquency in towns and regions
• election fraud cases

13. 3
21 4
10
10 2 11
3 1 12 16 3
9 1 14
11 2
1
2 12
17 1
5
Combination of crowd-sourced geo data about forest
fires and local reports by RIA Novosti
Philip Dudchuk & Daniel Hladky
SemTechBiz, San Francisco, June 5, 2012

14. A case study: country image analysis

15. Country image analysis
• Searching news content related to Russia across more
than 3,000 foreign sources
• Processing search results, tagging and aggregating
content with its metadata
• Producing statistics about reaction on subjects
connected to Russia (events, people, organizations)

16. Negativity Index
Tymoshenko’s case in Ukraine,
threat to boycott Euro 2012
‘Pussy riots’ punks
arrested
Top sources with biggest number of negative publications on
involvement of Russian politicians and businessmen in Yulia
Tymoshenko’s case

17. US media on Russia’s reaction on
the events in Syria
The New York Times The Financial Times
The Washington Post
Syria’s media on the same topic