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NEWS - News Engine Web Services
NEWS has developed News Intelligence Technology for the Semantic Web. Its main purpose was that of supplying news producers and consumers with automated tools for personalized content annotation, analysis, syndication, and intelligent retrieval.
Impact
NEWS addressed the need of news content producers for fast, precise, and standard-conform classification and ontology-based annotation of multi-lingual news item content, which is the basis for various innovative services. NEWS has developed a set of interoperable web services that can be integrated into news agencies' workflows. Furthermore, NEWS supported services for news content consumers like personalized news feeds, automated news content trend analysis, or semantic query and retrieval services in news archives. Within the project, NEWS tools covered English, Italian, and Spanish language.
NEWS's main innovation
The NEWS solutions comprised the automated classification of news items according to the standard subject reference coding scheme SRS of the International Press Communication Council IPTC; the news content enrichment by ontology-based annotation of entities and events; the query expansion and reasoning support for enhanced retrieval; and the cross-lingual linking of news items about a common content. The main innovative aspects can be summarized as:
- Using Semantic Web standards to define ontologies for the news industry;
- Implementing an ontological annotation component which automatically applies Semantic Web standards for the news industry to newswires;
- Developing news intelligence components with multilingual and speech processing capabilities, which use automatic ontological annotation to support semantic-based analysis, personalisation and delivery of knowledge from newswires
- Integrating ontological annotation and news intelligence components as Web services into a standard interoperable platform that enables end users and applications alike to find and utilise service components dynamically
NEWS's result
The project developed:
- an automated news classification and annotation engine, working in English, Italian, and Spanish language. Classification is according to the IPTC SRS coding scheme. The system processes news items in NITF 3.2 format.
- a heuristic deductive database which stores both the original news item and all associated facts, offers instance disambiguation and event matching, and realizes cross-language semantic query & retrieval services.
- a prototypical GUI which covers the key usage scenarios, including the interactive generation and processing of news content, the disambiguation of annotations, the browsing and querying of the knowledge base, and the event-based cross-language retrieval of stored news items with similar content.
- an exemplary domain ontology as backbone of the knowledge base, plus a continuously-growing set of actual news items within the prototype systems.
- components for automatic news content summarization and trend analysis
- life demonstrators for news classification and annotation
The various components are available as individual web services which enables their combination into user-specific solutions. Prototype solutions are currently deployed and tested within the news agencies who participate in the project.
More details
- NEWS publications
- NEWS Annual Public Report 2005 (PDF, 86KB)
- IST Results article: NEWS, but not as we know it (18 April 2006) (PDF, 121KB)
- The IPTC standard category list has been transformed into an interactive browsing and querying tool
- Online demos of the unstructured text analysis and automated news item classification
Administrative Details
- Start Date: 01 april 2004 - End Date: 31 march 2006
- Duration: 24 months
- Total EU funding: 1.499.996 EUR
List of Participants
NEWS is a joint effort of:
- two news agencies: Agenzia ANSA S. C. A R. L., Italy, and Agencia EFE S.A., Spain
- a specialist for automated text analysis and classification: Ontology Ltd., Israel
- two research partners with strong ontology & semantic web background: UNIVERSIDAD CARLOS III DE MADRID, Spain (with wide expertise in the news domain), and German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence - DFKI GmbH, Germany (acting as project coordinator)
Contact Person
- Dr. Ansgar Bernardi
- DFKI GmbH, Erwin-Schrödinger-Str.
- 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
- Tel: +49-631-205-3582