As a first step in a vast project to modernize its editorial system, AFP (the world's second largest press agency) has selected a trio of technology suppliers, Antidot - TEMIS - Mondeca, to deploy an analytics and research solution tailored for the multimedia content that it produces (news dispatches, photographs, news graphics and video).
AFP wants to ramp up this solution rapidly, allowing its professional customers to efficiently search a growing daily flow of multimedia and multilingual information, as well as an archive estimated to contain over 20 million documents. This application will initially be integrated in the web platform that markets AFP's photos, named "Image Forum".
At the end of 2007, with these issues in mind, AFP selected the technological partners that will meet its needs by associating Text Mining, XML indexing and semantic search solutions.
TEMIS, Mondeca and Antidot have partnered to provide an integrated solution for AFP: TEMIS contributes Luxidâ, a Text Mining application capable of handling the many languages in use at AFP; Mondeca provides ITM, a system to manage business-specific repositories, which can manage AFP's taxonomies and multilingual thesauri; Antidot responds with AFS, an indexing and search platform perfectly suited to the XML documents that AFP delivers. These three companies are accustomed to working together, the three solutions have already been combined in other application contexts, and the solution's deployment does not require the intervention of a third-party integrator.
"After studying the Text Mining marketplace and enterprise-level search engines, and prototyping several solutions, we now have the conviction that the development quality provided by these three French companies and the enthusiasm of their teams will allow us to obtain a high performance solution that is perfectly adapted to our needs and extremely upgradable. By the end of 2008, we will have an innovative, cross-media information search platform that integrates the latest standards for digital press and for the Semantic Web, such as NewsML-G2 and OWL," said Laurent Le Meur, technical director of the AFP Media Lab.
Currently in its testing phase, this solution will be released to AFP's media customers by the end of 2008 on its "Image Forum" B2B platform, supporting complex searches on a database of 8 million photos, sourced by AFP and 16 partners (including Getty Images). The utilization of these powerful Text Mining and information search techniques is targeted for future deployment to serve the in-house needs of AFP's journalists for searching archives and multimedia documents, and for the enrichment of metadata that accompanies content delivered via AFP's real-time feeds.
