SCIENCE

InterSystems announced that Press Computer Systems (PCS) has won the InterSystems Award for Breakthrough Applications. The recognition came for Knowledge, a fully integrated multimedia publishing and digital content management system.

PCS is an independent unit of The Claverley Group, a major U.K.-based news publisher. Facing consumers' growing demands for news availability anywhere, any time, and on virtually any device, it was clear that a completely new publishing platform was needed in order to ensure success in an increasingly challenging market. Requirements for the new software platform included empowering journalists, editors and production teams to publish news in multiple formats simultaneously; decoupling content from the formats used to convey it; consolidating pagination, wire service management, picture desk and digital archive management into a single system; and, providing intelligent workflow for easier, faster, and richer multimedia publication.

Based on those requirements, PCS chose the InterSystems CACHE high-performance object database as the foundation of the new application's architecture. "CACHE enables us to use elements of content as objects, to work with them and to output them in different ways, to different media, and to multiple locations quite easily," said Philip Walker, Managing Director of PCS. "In the past, producing a newspaper meant stopping news production in order to get the paper out," he explained. "Our digital technology actually changes the way that news operates. You can keep rolling with updated news and we can take that model and implement it across multiple different markets and verticals."

PCS Knowledge provides core collaboration and process management functionality that is extended by using the InterSystems Ensemble rapid integration and development platform for messaging, providing a business rules engine, business process orchestration, and workflow and integration with third-party systems. The result is a publishing system where stories remain dynamic. And, with InterSystems' semantic analysis technology called iKnow, Knowledge can associate and store related structured or unstructured content including text, sound, video, images and sources so that a story or its elements can be retrieved based on queries and associations -- some of which are proactively generated by iKnow itself -- to other stories. "The entire publishing process becomes easier and ensures that material is always accessible for re-use," Walker noted.

Knowledge is now being used by publications throughout Claverley including two evening newspapers, 24 weekly newspapers and multiple news magazines. "We've architected the system to be the digital archive for the newspapers... they will have access to everything written for the past 35 years as well as about 16 million pictures. We're using iKnow to reindex the info and as soon as a new story or picture comes in, it's immediately text mined," he said.

"We are also engaged with multiple clients external to Claverley and are about to begin marketing internationally," Walker continued, pointing out that Knowledge is available via a software-as-a-service approach as well as through traditional licensing.

"Knowledge integrates very advanced technologies, some of which are completely new to the newspaper industry," said Paul Grabscheid, InterSystems Vice President of Strategic Planning. "This system is enabling new ways of working in a market sector that relies on innovation for competitive survival. It is our pleasure to recognize the success of PCS and its breakthrough application."

"We feel that we're going to change the way that publishing companies work here and abroad and we're extremely pleased to be recognized with this industry award," said Walker.