Agence France-Presse brings businesses the next generation of personalized news delivery/services with semantic technology.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

01:45 PM - 02:15 PM

Level:	Case Study
Location:	Yosemite A

To cope with today's rapidly increased demand for personalized multimedia news products and services through multiple publishing channels AFP (Agence France-Presse), one of the three world's biggest news agencies, in the 2011/2012 time-frame is renewing its back-office infrastructure.

With this activity, in cooperation with Finnish based Profium Oy, AFP selected a semantic technology solution for managing personalized customer subscriptions supporting both the scalability and the high-availability requirements needed for today's real-time global news distribution business.

The presentation describes the environment and market dynamics where a business worth multiple hundreds of millions of dollars when supported with semantic software can add significant value to its customers when used for product definitions, customer subscription management and real-time matching of interests.

Janne Saarela is the founder and CEO of Profium, a company that improves its clients competitiveness and creates them new business opportunities with Semantic Web based software products. Dr. Saarela has past history with W3C, Eurecom institute, Helsinki University of Technology and CERN where has has contributed to electronic publishing initiatives.

Mr. Briere has been with AFP since 1987 and has participated in several internal development projects relative to editorial systems and digital content distribution. Early on Mr. Briere introduced UNIX to the organisation and connected AFP to UUNET in 1992 and Internet soon after. In1998 Mr. Briere realized AFP's first multimedia editorial system with Internet based delivery to AFP's B2B customers. Since 2006 Mr. Briere is the deputy manager of their development group and participates in the technology strategy work at AFP. Currently he coordinates the editorial and distribution systems renewal project called IRIS.