Semantics in the Driver’s Seat

News the New Way

Philip Dudchuk

Head of Semantic Production Department,RIA Novosti

Founded in the beginning of the WW2, RIA Novosti was initially a news agency reporting on the situation at the war front

1941

First news websites looked like simple news feeds

Metadata rules the world of news

• News metadata gets right content to right departments of the customer

• Metadata locates the reported events

• Metadata enables vertical products focused on selected areas (banking, automotive, government)

Boom of platforms in late 2000s

2011: Need in a common Semantic Publishing Platform

• Build and manage a common news ontology and vocabularies for all products and news websites

• Generate metadata for both news items and articles on websites

• Aggregate content and metadata for further use in end-user applications (websites and mobile apps)

Evolution of the Publishing Process

News Ontology

Filtering news content by triple queries at the customer’s end (via API):

• content about any oil & gas company• content about any employee of any public body in a

given region of Russia• content about any event going to happen in my city

Common metadata for newswire and web content allow to blend free and paid content into new products (news archive)

Impact 1: Broadcasting News with Semantic Metadata

My ria.ru

• Locating the user and filtering the content by region• Gathering user interests and filtering content by

entities and topics

Impact 2: Adaptive Content of Websites

Putting together news metadata with external content

• summer forest fires• juvenile delinquency in towns and regions• election fraud cases

Impact 3: Non-traditional Aggregations and Analytics

Philip Dudchuk & Daniel HladkySemTechBiz, San Francisco, June 5, 2012

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Combination of crowd-sourced geo data about forest fires and local reports by RIA Novosti

A case study: country image analysis

Country image analysis

• Searching news content related to Russia across more than 3,000 foreign sources

• Processing search results, tagging and aggregating content with its metadata

• Producing statistics about reaction on subjects connected to Russia (events, people, organizations)

Top sources with biggest number of negative publications on involvement of Russian politicians and businessmen in Yulia Tymoshenko’s case

Negativity Index

Tymoshenko’s case in Ukraine, threat to boycott Euro 2012

‘Pussy riots’ punks arrested

US media on Russia’s reaction on the events in Syria

Syria’s media on the same topic

The New York TimesThe Washington Post

The Financial Times