Online Information Conference

ADDED VALUE SERVICES OF FINANCIAL NEWSPAPERS WITH SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGY

Il Sole 24 Ore is one of the leading daily newspaper publishers in Italy, providing news and information services about politics, the economy, legislation and Italian and international financial markets. 

We found that semantic technologies could bring considerable benefits to a number of areas within our business.

In this paper, I will discuss how semantic technologies were used to support Il Sole 24 Ore in three important aims:

- increase the monetization of our content by both enhancing the relevance of information presented to our customers, and improving the effectiveness of our SEO and SEM activities. 

- to improve the user experience on our portal http://www.sole24ore.com/, through the implementation of innovative solutions;

- to introduce new efficiencies in our publishing activities through automation in the analysis and classification of content. 

Our efforts in these three areas brought value on both sides of the business case equation through both revenue enhancement and cost efficiencies. Automatic categorisation and ranking of content, and creating linkages between content, enabled us to suggest content of interest to users encouraging them to view more pages and spend more time at our site.

Complementing this, we were also able to enhance the user experience using search software to allow users to apply all sorts of filters to the content (topics, concepts, domains, many types of entities) to drill down within a result set and retrieve the most relevant content sorted by relevance. Automated tagging, categorisation and identification of relevant related content also enabled the simplification of the most complex, and tedious part of the work of the editors, thus increasing their availability to perform more valuable tasks. 

This case study will provide valuable insight into the key elements of the business case for publishers and others who are evaluating how semantic technology will help their organisation. We will also discuss some of the lessons learned and provide a brief view of possible future developments.

Speaker

• Andrea Gianotti, Head of Digital Document Management, Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy
• Raffaele Turiel, Head of Content Management, Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy