Last week, more than 300 experts and executives from German publishing houses met in Berlin near the famous Brandenburg Gate in order to talk about the current situation and the challenges within the publishing industry in Germany.

The conference widened the scope this year and invited quite a number of speakers from the US, Canada and the UK, which was very fruitful for the discussions going on.

I think that three different areas were in the center of the presentations and workshops:

• The general transformation process of publishing houses with regard to the rapidly changing user behavior and the user expectations (“Digital natives”)
• The transformation process from a (print) product centric view to a content centric view and the accompanying challenges around metadata and content enrichment, context and discoverability of content
• The rapid growth of mobile applications, mainly in the area of tablet PCs, but also around smartphones

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During our regular LOD2 plenary meeting in Vienna, which was by the way very intense and enlightening, I had the privilege to join a workshop on Open Data and the OGD Business Day in the evening.

Big business as well as a killer application for Open Data are not yet there, but companies like Wolters Kluwer can and probably will play an important role in this new ecosystem. Why? Because the assets we already have are the assets that are needed: knowledge about content and data, knowlegde about the domain, sophisticated technological skills and direct access to the customers with elaborated products at the core of their professional key processes.

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From 21st to 23rd March, the LOD2 consortium will hold its plenary meeting in Vienna, Austria. As with the previous plenaries, there will be an evening event with local governments and administrations around Open Government Data (OGD). One key aspect in this meeting will be the focus on what impact OGD has on business. I personally think quite a bit, especially for a legal publisher like Wolters Kluwer. Read further >

In my first post on the IS blog, I was claiming that “Search was Yesterday”. In my view, this is a true statement, but I think that also the opposite is true – at least with regard to retrieval engines.

Let’s have a look at contemporary, modern retrieval engines. They present a very solid and proven technology, they can handle a high volume of (textual) data and there are ways to solve the challenge around change both from the angle of data (new data comes in very quickly) as well as from the angle of the user (different users want different things and one user also evolves over time).

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People who know me, will probably describe me as being analytical and pragmatic. And I fully agree with that assessment – most of the time. But every now and then something happens, which touches my emotional side and if my analytical part also agrees, I can get rather passionate. Exactly that happened in the previous months, when a vision became reality. I am talking about Jurion – an innovative and new kind of software and knowledge platform for the legal market, covering all the different aspects that really create added value to our customers’ professional processes. Read further >

At Frankfurt Book Fair, I gave a presentation on “Semantic Web for Publishers”, including what semantic search means and how it affects our current and future business. Since all chairs were taken – some people even had to stand at the back – and nobody in the audience left before the session was over, one can certainly conclude that the buzz word “semantic” has caught the attention of the publishing community. Read further >

The Frankfurt Book Fair is certainly one of the main events of the information services and publishing industry in the world. Over the last years, the focus of information professionals as part of the community has changed in particular. Mobile apps, online research, and software integration are at the center of attention. This is also true for semantic search capabilities. And why? Because customers ask for intelligent and innovative solutions. Read further >

I was one of almost 500 attendees, who met in the beginning of September to join the international I-Know and I-Semantics conferences held in parallel in Graz(Austria). The conferences envisioned developments and technologies in the area of knowledge management and the semantic web. Read further >

In reference to a love song from the band “Foreigner”, I chose the title to this blog post. At the TechConference in Atlanta, end of June, the most recent tech developments inside and outside of Wolters Kluwer met the latest and also well-known customer requirements from our different target groups. For me it became clear during the conference that the answers around search – that we currently offer to solve our customer’s problems – are indeed not more than a specific facet anymore. Read further >