Asset Management

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — David Arnold, director of product strategy for Dow Jones, has overseen the evolution of the company’s Dow Jones’ Professional Information Business services, which offers clients insights based on 30-plus years of news stories, covering more than 1.3 billion articles in 28 languages from nearly 30,000 regions.

And organizing all that information into actionable information isn’t easy. To organize all that content, the company employs Dow Jones Intelligent Identifiers, and at the outset, Dow used rules-based coding, “which is very, very time consuming and requires a lot of human interaction or intervention,” Arnold said, speaking May 17 during the HITS Spring: The Hollywood Innovation & Technology Summit.

So, in the last few years, Dow took a different tact, building out a structured taxonomy, using machine learning and artificial intelligence. “This helps our customers by not having them wade through hundreds of articles while using free text searches.”

With the help of semantic intelligence software company Expert System, the new Dow Jones ID system is an evolving taxonomy, that’s constantly evolving, and reflects current trends and topics. And new codes are created every day to refine searches to include emerging topics, with Arnold offering up examples of crypto-currencies and drones. “Not only do we look at new trends, we look at old ones,” he added. “For example, VCR technology used to be a code. We really don’t need that one anymore.”

With the help of Expert System’s services, Arnold estimates Dow Jones has saved itself 11 year’s worth of tagging and coding efforts. “[They’ve been] using software, particularly ours, to deliver better information to their clients,” said Ian Cameron, VP of digital media for Expert System.

“We helped them define gaps in their taxonomies, and a natural language platform,” he said, adding that his company will help Dow Jones’ system work with 16 languages in its discovery offerings by the end of the year. “We offer a rules-based approach toward understanding their content.”

Based on the Dow Jones Professional Information Business news archive, the company has built three different business: the flagship Dow Jones Factiva (which serves as a search engine for all those articles), the Dow Jones DNA (Data-News-Analytics) service, and Dow Jones Risk & Compliance.

That last one emerged from within Factiva, serving as a niche product that “helps clients meet regulatory and compliance challenges head-on,” Arnold said. “We utilize our premium news database and other open-source information to produce custom due diligence reports, lists of special interest persons, and entities of interest.

“Risk & Compliance exists to protect our customers.” The services help corporations unveil potential terrorists, money launderers and also protects Dow customers against regulatory risks, he added.

And in January 2017, Arnold helped launch the DNA service, which offers programmatic access to the news archive.

Dow has looked to Expert System’s software to help it tackle the unstructured data involved in discoverability of the content for its clients. Older systems that only used keywords made it challenging to interpret context, of content, he added.

“Harnessing the power of our metadata allows customers to build out models, data analytics, drive visualizations and deep learning,” Arnold said.

HITS Spring was produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), in association with Women in Technology: Hollywood (WiTH); the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and the Smart Content Council. The event was presented by Entertainment Partners, with sponsorship by Expert System, LiveTiles, Microsoft Azure, Ooyala, Veritone, Amazon Web Services, Avanade, Avid, IBM Security, MarkLogic, Aspera, Light Point Security, MicroStrategy, SAS, Scaeva Technologies, Western Digital, Brainstorm, Zaszou IT Consulting and Bob Gold & Associates.

To hear the Expert System-Dow Jones presentations, click here and here.