Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC (Euromoney) is one of the largest publishers of business and financial publications in Europe. With 84 different brands and business units, the company publishes more than 100 magazines, newsletters and journals, including the leading financial market titles Euromoney and Institutional Investor. Euromoney’s BCA Research unit is a provider of research, analysis and forecasts for global economies.
The Goal
Euromoney wanted to streamline the substantial amount of content produced daily throughout the company by its 84 business units.
To achieve that, they required a single, consolidated platform for creating and presenting this content. The new platform had to be able to easily reuse and repurpose content within and between the business units as well as to provide rich navigational and analytical capabilities.
Initially, this smart sector-specific solution was adopted by Euromoney’s BCA Research unit but, eventually, it will be rolled out company-wide.
The Challenge
The biggest challenge for managing content came from the wide variety of production, content management and presentation systems with no ability to communicate between them, which were inherited when Euromoney acquired other companies in the financial sector publishing space.
A single, group-wide platform needed to take care of the wide variety of domains covered by the different business units – from trading in commodities to macroeconomic research. Addressing this diversity required flexible domain modeling and different content enrichment mechanisms in order to provide deep analytics and easy interaction to subscribers.
The Solution: A Unified Semantic Publishing Platform
To help tackle these challenges, Euromoney contracted software and information architecture consultants who had worked with the BBC and the Press Association on similar projects. The consultants recommended a semantic technology approach to publication production that included a triplestore and automated semantic annotation based on text analytics.
Euromoney selected Ontotext’s leading semantic graph database GraphDB in its enterprise set-up as a replication cluster for their novel semantic publishing platform. The GraphDB cluster was also enriched with semantic annotation plugins for dynamic updates of the text analytics pipelines so that whenever data in the triplestore changed, it ensured a “single version of the truth”. This resulted in the first RDF database providing semantic annotation of content as an out of the box capability.
The entire text analytics pipeline was developed from scratch in the context of the GATE framework and Ontotext proprietary components to cover different macro-economic concepts, relationships and events (markets, financial instruments, indicators, currency pairs, economic conditions, etc.).
The following snippet is an example of annotations of various entities, concepts and macroeconomic conditions:
Why Choose Ontotext?
In 2013, Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC, the international online information and events group and its subsidiary, BCA Research, set out to create a new publishing and information platform which would include the latest authoring, storing, and display technologies including semantic search and a triple store repository. Following a successful proof of concept using the OWLIM (now GraphDB) semantic repository and KIM text extraction (which is using GATE), Euromoney commissioned Ontotext to create a semantic database for both their macroeconomic investment research reports and their more market oriented content, like merger and acquisition deals news, IPOs, Equity prospects, Bonds issuance, etc.,
Kap Monet, Head of Special Projects, Euromoney Institutional Investor
With Ontotext’s technology solution:
- the huge amount of content produced by Euromoney is now semantically analyzed, enriched and integrated into a streamlined production environment with complete visibility across the various business units.
- the automatic recognition of concepts leads to improved author productivity and context-based search results, which provides rich content analytics and interaction to subscribers.
- the cost savings from streamlining the content for over 100 publications automatically instead of manually are dramatic.
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