A unified multilingual legal thesaurus for classification of reusable content

Kluwer Belgium (Groupe Wolters Kluwer)

Using ITM Kluwer Belgium were able to rationalize their publishing processes by maintaining a unified French & Flemish thesaurus for the classification of legal content (laws, regulations, jurisprudence, and comments) and by automating end of book index creation and customizing indexing for online search engines.

Customer challenge

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Kluwer Belgium (WKB) is part of the Wolters Kluwer group, a €3.7 billion worldwide provider of information, tools and solutions that help professionals make their most critical decisions.

WKB provide a range of products covering multiple areas including human resources, tax, law, the medical profession, safety and environment. Since Belgium has three national languages, most products must be provided in French and Flemish versions. At the time WKB contacted Mondeca, products were paper and CD-ROM based, all content was organized on a per-editorial product basis, and content indexes were based on per-product lists of keywords.

WKB wanted to bring this content on-line and to be able to keep it continually updated. In order to support this goal, they decided on a 4 point strategy to improve classification and publishing productivity:

introduce the notion of a reusable document (content unit)
introduce a unified concept based thesaurus model
perform content classification and enrichment upstream, i.e. at acquisition rather than production time
automate index generation for book and CD-ROM publications

Solution

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WKB chose Mondeca's Intelligent Topic Manager (ITM) as the basis for their unified Thesaurus Management System. ITM provided the required thesaurus management, content enrichment and classification, and index generation features.

The first phase in the project involved transforming the existing indexing system keyword lists into concept based mono-lingual and bi-lingual thesauri. This transformation involved merging of thesaurus terms (e.g. to indicate which of the merged terms is the preferred term) and mapping between thesauri. An editorial front office application was created using the thesaurus application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by ITM to support these merge and mapping features.

The second phase was to move content from per-product independent silos to a unified content repository. This transformation eliminated duplication of content in different products, leading to more productive content update. When creating a product, editors used the editorial system to define the list of content units to be included in the product.

Now all content undergoes controlled classification, using only terms from the thesauri, thus ensuring that content is classified in a uniform manner. Thesaurus update can only be performed by thesaurus administrators.

End-of-book index generation is now fully automated for book and CD-ROM publications using specific index management functions in ITM.

Key ITM Benefits

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The overall benefits for WKB were many:

uniform classification based on concept thesauri
ability to publish the same content on paper, CDROM and the web
ability to rapidly create custom and new products by leveraging already classified content
improved publishing productivity through automated index generation, reducing generation time from days to hours

These benefits were enabled by the following features in ITM:

multi-lingual thesaurus management including preferred term, synonym, broader term-narrower term and related term associations
maintenance of content metadata apart from actual content
flexible Java and Web Service APIs for easy integration into information systems
automatic index generation based on editorial-product specific profiles

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