The St. Louis Post-Dispatch installs SCC MediaServer Calais module for automated content enrichment.

April 1, 2010

ALPHARETTA, GA., April 1, 2010 -- SCC is pleased to announce the installation of the SCC MediaServer Calais module at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (circ. 213k [m-sat], 401k [sun]).

The SCC Calais Module interfaces SCC MediaServer systems directly to OpenCalais, a service provided by Thomson Reuters. OpenCalais uses natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and other techniques, to analyze each record and extract a wide variety of entities, facts and events from your unstructured content.

According to Gary Bohn, Systems Specialist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
"Newspapers know that relevant links in a story or photo can lead to numerous additional page views. The key is "relevant" links. Often staff-generated links come up short and are too subjective in nature. Calais allows you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art tagging functionality into your digital assets."

SCC's Calais Module makes the entire process automatic. Any number of SCC MediaFactory Calais channels can be created to monitor MediaServer libraries for newly arriving content, for existing stored content, or for content marked for delivery to one or more target destinations. Each channel is provided customized instructions by the user to process only records meeting certain criteria, and to use only specified fields, e.g. Headline, Body Text, Caption, but not Byline, Publication and Section.

The channel handles all interface and negotiation with the OpenCalais service, automatically storing the returned enrichment tags and data into specified MediaServer record fields. Calais processing times are typically 1-2 seconds per record. At any time, MediaServer records already processed by Calais can be easily reprocessed in order to take advantage of future enhancements to the Reuters OpenCalais service.

"Tags are the driving force behind our new CMS system," said Gary Bohn, "The SCC Calais module indexes and tags each story and photo uploaded to our CMS. Assets now have more tags than ever before. This in turn enriches the viewer’s experience by providing more related content. When our new CMS goes live in May, we expect the Calais indexing channel to be the backbone of our tagging process."

The SCC Calais module also includes a Rich Internet Application (RIA) viewer application, launchable from any Calais-enriched record, either from SCC MediaGrid or the SCC web client. The viewer provides a hierarchical tree of entities, facts, events, and social tags extracted from the record, as well as a marked-up version of the record’s text identifying each of the entities, facts, events and other enrichment metadata in their actual context.

About SCC

SCC MediaServer is a fully integrated Text, Photo, Page, Graphics, Sound and Video media workflow management system. The system offers a wide collection of features and components tailored to production and archive workflows, incorporating sophisticated full-text search technology and supporting a wide range of multimedia file formats and related XMP (or other) metadata.

Optional modules are available for Content Syndication, News Budget and Assignment Creation, Tracking and Scheduling, NewsML and ObjectML Integration, RSS Import and Feed Syndication, Semantic Metadata Enrichment, eEdition Generation and Presentation, and Data Replication.

SCC MediaServer is installed at 150 media companies in 20 countries, with a total of 6500 licensed users and holding a combined quarter of a billion assets. Outside the USA, SCC has distributors covering Australia, Europe, the Far East, and Central and South America.

Contact: SCC

Lee Funnell, Vice President
770.751.8500 ext. 145
lee.funnell@sccmediaserver.com
http://www.sccmediaserver.com