Polopoly Web CMS Incorporates Atex Text Mining Engine

By David Roe (@druadh20) Aug 21, 2009

Atex Releases Polopoly v9.13 Web CMS

Swedish content management provider Polopoly (news, site) has announced that it has integrated U.S. digital media giant’s Text Mining engine into Polopoly CMS 9.13.

Hardly a surprise given that Atex bought Polopoly last year with the specific intention of increasing its revenue directly from digital media (as opposed to software) to 50% of entire revenues by 2011.

With Polopoly v9.13 they may well meet that target, as the text mining solution should prove attractive to publishers with a lot of digital content lying around that could be making money for them if they could only get it organized.

That, by way of simple explanation is exactly what Atex’s Text Mining solution does. It enables users to create entire web sites from related theme-based content automatically. The financial implications for newspaper companies trying to make revenue from archived content are obvious.

Content Management And Text Mining

So what do you get if you buy into Polopoly CMS 9.13? Well, the first thing you get is quite a lot of history. Atex has been providing software solutions to the newspaper industry for years and generally credited with pioneering the move from hot lead to cold type in printing. They also developed Atex messaging credited as being one of the forerunners of e-mail and instant messaging.

Currently, the software is built using open standards, XML and a service-orientated architecture. With the acquisition of Poloploy last year, it bought into a Java-based Web CMS provider. For its part, Polopoly up to last year had gone from being a start-up in 2000 to the largest vendor of content management systems in Sweden.

An entirely self-funded company, it worked with a large variety of clients such as CN Group, Belgian media group Cornello and MTV Networks, who partnered with Polopoly to provide the back-end for its College Publisher platform used by over 550 college newspapers.

Text Mining And Widgets

So throwing together the two companies in their first joint release since the buy-out was bound to throw up something really juicy for the publishing industry. The combination of text mining with the Polopoly is, if nothing else, juicy - well interesting at least.

The new solution comes in the shape of a CMS whose metadata driven publishing functions allows it create theme-based landing pages that, the company hopes, will increase on-site time, the number of page views, and ultimately the number of unique users.

At the core of the solution is a new widget that greatly enhances a user’s ability to search for, and utilize documents that are stored across multiple sites in the same enterprise.

The content that these searches throw up is automatically tagged and categorized according to criteria that have been established by the text editors.

Editor Defined Searching

However, this is no random selection of criteria; the editors receive suggestions based on the metadata and IPTC categorization, as well as criteria such as person, company, organization and location. And even better — just by ‘pushing the button’ the editors invoke the widget, and the whole process gets done automatically, even going so far as to produce ‘batch categorizations.’

With a new web services interface the search and classification processes are efficient, and, more importantly, consistent.

“Our goal with Polopoly 9.13 was to provide functionality that takes advantage of our integration with Atex Text Mining,” said Anders Weijnitz, Atex Global Product Manager of Polopoly.

“For a media company, text mining helps to organize the mass amounts of information it deals with every day … and also improves the probability that content will be found by search engines, which further increase traffic and Web site access.”