Tuesday, 5/22/2007
11:45 AM - 12:45 PM
Level: Case Study

In France, as a publisher, LexisNexis® faces the classic challenges:

• Manage single sourcing and content reusability
• Implement a flexible and efficient publishing factor
• Improve editorial processes such as automatic legal sources management, structured authoring assistance for editorial staff, and implementation of a common indexing tool

But for lawyers, LexisNexis® has to take into account specific constraints:

• Precisely manage legal content references
• Perform fine grained indexing of legal content for extremely accurate classification
• Describe legal relations and dependencies between content, such as legal citations and versioning of legislation

To efficiently address the above requirements, LexisNexis decided to move from a content-centric to a knowledge-centric editorial system based on the Intelligent Topic Manager from Mondeca. LexisNexis® will present its legal publishing ontology, including the modelling of simple legal entities and terminology, but also more complex business objects including editorial content, acts, statutes, publications, and semantic dependencies. LexisNexis® will demonstrate how the resulting knowledge base, integrated with text-mining and editorial tools, has become not only the back-bone of the LexisNexis® editorial system but also the key enabler of new products for our customers. The complex ontology underlying the system contains more than 10 million topics, and an equivalent number of associations.

Jamal has 20 years of experience in knowledge acquisition (satellite and aerial image processing), knowledge modelling (distributed and cooperative reasoning, skills modelling for HR) and knowledge access (end-user interfaces for searching, discovering, sharing). Prior to LexisNexis, he worked at Steria, Alcatel, and the French National Space Research Agency (CNES). Currently responsible for R&D at LexisNexis® in France, Jamal is implementing a complete redesign of their editorial system for non-technical end-users and the automatic processing of unstructured information.

As CEO, Jean Delahousse drives the corporate strategy and technological direction for Mondeca. A renowned expert in semantic technologies, ontologies and their application to content organization, Jean is a regular speaker at semantic technology conferences and events worldwide. Prior to Mondeca, Jean founded BDB Participation, a financial software editor he successfully grew and sold to Line Data in 1999. Jean has also held a variety of technical and management roles at Andersen Consulting, the Paris Stock Exchange and Diagram, a financial software company. Jean is a graduate of the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris, a leading French business school.