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.
I am not really sure, if this is a correct English sentence, but abbreviations show that meaning and semantics indeed have a lot to tell us. Looking at Wikipedia, you will find that “ISWC” has four different meanings – and I am pretty sure that there are even more around the globe. One is: “International Symposium on Wearable Computers”. There are also others, which are as meaningful like: “International Speed Windsurfing Class” or “International Semantic Web Conference”; the latter I will talk about today.
Following with my series of posts about semantic search, this time I would like to speak about our experience in accompanying our users to move from the traditional metadata search to “one single search box”. Read further >
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 my previous post I ended up with a promise: that I would had keep on sharing my thoughts about semantic search. And now I’m back with another post on this topic. 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 >
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.
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:
In my last post I stated that user satisfaction is key in retaining customers and in achieving competitive advantages. Here I will discuss a different aspect of the same topic. We aim to offer the best products to generate user satisfaction. When launching a new product however, sometimes you need to focus on the time-to-market variable and speed up the release, which can lead to having to compromise on offering some functionality and/or the complete content you estimated at design time. This is a very delicate decision to take, indeed. Read further >
