A bigger part of the Netherlands is located under sea level, which gives me the association of living in a submarine. But this does not imply that the Dutch are hiding from anything, quite on the contrary!
Exquisite research is taking place here, which was very well illustrated during our LOD2 plenary meeting end of March in Amsterdam; after last year’s plenaries in Vienna and Cambridge.
2013 is a critical year for Wolters Kluwer – critical in a positive sense; there will be many decision points all over the place where we as an organization can prove that we are ready for the next step. Decision points starting from economic implications from the financial crisis, the implementation of the new strategy life cycle announced by our CEO, via changes in the competitive landscape to finally substantial efforts in our local markets (e.g. Jurion or LOD2).
This year will not be a smooth year, but it will be a successful year when we will become a truly social Media company. As you can see, the “social” is not written in capital letters! I am not referring to a “Social Media” company, but to a social “Media company”. In order to be able to master the challenges ahead of us, we need to be even more proactive in socializing, networking, bundling our assets on a European, but also on a global level.
Last week I attended the Wolters Kluwer Global Platform Organization (GPO) user conference, a yearly event where we as an internal technology service organization meet face to face with our business partners, mostly product managers and technologists from Wolters Kluwer business units across the globe. It was again an inspiring event and the various speakers testified to how much and how fast the information industry has changed, how this unavoidably influences our customers’ expectations, and how we are addressing this. Read further >
In her keynote at last week’s I-Semantics conference in Graz (Austria), Lora Aroyo was talking about how vague central concepts like ‘object’ and ‘event’ can actually be modeled from a scientific point of view. She showed an introductory slide, in which an event in contrast to an object is mainly defined by its temporal dimension. An event has therefore a beginning and an end – and a lot of developments and changes in between. According to this definition, I immediately thought: Wow, I am an event as well!
“Actionable Content” as was explained in a recent post by Jack Lynch “means moving from a model where we structure content through meta tags and taxonomies to make it more ‘discoverable,’ to a model where we continue to structure for discoverability but also use Natural Language Processing, Text Analytics and domain expertise to make the content more ‘actionable’.” Read further >
Sorting a result list by “relevancy” is the most broadly recognized attribute of a search engine. Relevancy is just a form of prediction, a probability of “usefulness” (that is also a fuzzy concept). It is the same as a librarian, who after an information request, would bring a selection of documents that “will probably be of interest for that expressed need.” But how does it work and how can it be improved? Read further >
Government agencies across the world are in charge of publishing legislation and regulations that have passed through some constitutionally defined legislative or regulatory process. Obviously today this is done in some digital format, which can be less (PDF) or more (RDF+XHTML) suitable for repurposing. Other contributors to this blog have written about Open Government Data, both from a US and a EU standpoint, so I will not elaborate on the topic as such. I did however want to reference it as an introduction to my blog post of today, which touches upon a different facet of legal and regulatory information “accessibility”. Read further >
As I pointed out in my first post and as I will also be talking about to attendees of Wolters Kluwer’s 2012 Technology Conference in my upcoming key note tomorrow, the next wave of technology innovation I see coming our way is something that I call “Intelligent Content EveryWare”. As we are moving towards an era of Ubiquitous Computing and continue to move along the data to information to intelligence continuum, great opportunities open up that allow us to add even more value to the work lives of the professionals we serve. Let’s look at two important developments that form the basis for “Intelligent Content EveryWare:” Intelligence and Actionable Content. Read further >
During this year’s Wolters Kluwer Technology Conference, we will present and discuss an important aspect of the change process the company as a whole is currently experiencing.
In addition to offering customers our content as textual information in any form and channel available, we more and more offer them knowledge as well. And the importance of this asset will be boosted in the coming years, due to new user requirements and new technologies coming from the market.
In one of his last posts, my dear colleague John Barker was giving his thoughts on hybrid content-software products. I’d like to add a new aspect to that story.
A couple of years ago, large IT companies offering infrastructure services for their customers, faced the challenge that the delivery of technology alone was no longer enough to make a customer happy. One technology was very similar to another and therefore the cost aspect became more and more prominent, which of course vendors did not like at all. So they were looking for new assets they could offer. The idea of additional services is obvious and so they approached companies like publishing houses saying: “Hey, look, we’ve got the technical access to the internal systems of our customers, let’s use this as an additional distribution channel for content products.” For many reasons, this simple approach did not work on a large scale.
But more recently, software companies approach publishing houses and information providers for different reasons.
