Hachette Filipacchi Media

Industry : Publishing

Moving from BASIS to ITM, Hachette Filipacchi Media were able to deploy a rich, flexible and easy to maintain knowledge base representing over 50 years of history.

Customer challenge

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Hachette Filipacchi Media (HFM) is one of the world's leading magazine publishers with more than 240 titles including ELLE and Premiere. Each magazine retains editorial independence but has access to a number of shared services including documentation and advertising.

The documentation service provides qualified information and reports to magazine editorial teams from a rich knowledge base leveraging over 50 years of well classified press archives. This knowledge base constitutes a rich history of people, events, musical works, books, concerts, movies, wars, economics and politics.

When HFM contacted Mondeca, their existing system built on the BASIS application had several problems:

• limited flexibility, making modifications extremely expensive
• no full text indexing of content
• poor link management between different types of objects in the knowledge base (people, events, companies, movies, etc.)

The project presented three major challenges:

• creation of a rich knowledge base model including over 20 subject types, 12 links types, over 230 attribute types for subject qualification, and 15 controlled lists including a large thesaurus
• migration of the existing knowledge base, given the unvalidated nature of the existing data and the limited features of the existing data manipulation and export tools
• creation of an efficient user interface allowing users to find information in the knowledge base and the classified archives and to create custom reports in response to journalist queries

Solution

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HFM decided to build a brand new solution respecting three constraints:

• immediately operational
• sufficiently flexible to support the group's ever changing information management needs
• based on stable, open and standard-based technologies to avoid vendor lock-in and to enable interoperability to facilitate connection to other HFM applications

The chosen solution has two main components:

• Intelligent Topic Manager for controlled list and thesaurus management, and the provision of a sophisticated knowledge base (7000 terms in the thesaurus and controlled lists, 670 000 subjects, 620 000 semantic links between subjects, 4 000 000 attributes describing subjects)
• an XML repository and search engine to managed collected and classified articles (over 2 million articles)

The solution was integrated by HFM and the software suppliers. Specific components were developed for article classification and a unified search interface into the knowledge base and the classified articles.

Migration was made possible by developing specific conversion tools for BASIS records and the development of a migration workbench based on the Oracle DBMS. Using ITM and an XML repository it was possible to perform progressive migrations to the new system, allowing the end user to validate each migration step and to rollback a step if problems appeared.

Key ITM Benefits

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The new system is fast, efficient and easy to use. The following tangible benefits have been achieved:

• Successful migration of existing BASIS data
• Creation of a rich and more controlled knowledge base, with an easily updatable model
• Easy to use search and navigation user interface for knowledge base and content querying, using both full text and metadata indexing
• Provision of an easy to use "shopping cart” of selected information and results, allowing users to quickly build reports for journalists
• Reduced maintenance cost