Talk addressed at the XXIV Encuentro sobre la edición ‘Las nuevas formas de edición y su incidencia en los derechos de autores y editores’ de la Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo (UIMP), Santander, Spain, July 2008

1. Content Development in
the New Publisher’s
world;
Beyond Web 2.0:
The semantic web
Guy Van Peel
Santander 10 July 2008

2. 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

3. 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”

4. 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.

6. 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

7. In the midst of change…
 Spotlight on Semantic…
 …Web
 …Technologies
 …Publishing

8. 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/

9. 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

10. 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.

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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…

15. 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!