Digital transformation as an accelerator for semantic technologies

It’s been over a decade since Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory, a global leader in providing professional information, software solutions, and services, and the Semantic Web Company (SWC) joined forces to embark on a journey of digital transformation. Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory, with customers across Europe and the U.S., has benefited from using taxonomy management capabilities in SWC’s PoolParty Semantic Suite to provide organic feedback within and beyond their companies.

Their main request was to diversify their product offerings by including a holistic, taxonomy-based solution in order to manage large amounts of data. This dynamic process requires not only an elaborate analysis and assessment of technical concepts and procedures but also the continuous establishment of medium and long-term business models. The systematic distinction between written content and its metadata opens up completely new opportunities for companies like Wolters Kluwer.

Right from the start, both Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory and SWC had ambitious goals and worked closely together on projects that would not only revolutionize the industry but also redefine technological standards that are still in place today. The precise and target group-specific processing of legal information is the main objective of companies such as Wolters Kluwer. With the emergence of semantic technologies, it became increasingly obvious that the media industry had to find effective and agile ways to understand, analyze, and interpret data.

A match made in semantic heaven !

Both parties understood early on the need for not only a strong alliance but continuous innovation in an ever-changing digital realm, and consequently started with the development and further implementation of semantic technologies. At this point, it’s not predominantly about technology but the process of continuous change and digitalization.

The entire enterprise needs to be semantified,” says Christian Dirschl, Chief Content Architect at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory in Germany.

Relying on convoluted spreadsheets, isolated data silos, and unmanaged accumulated knowledge was the main hindrance and caused unwanted implications that affected the company from the inside out.

While XML is powerful in representing the syntactic, structural properties of data and is, thus, particularly suitable for their exchange, the representation of semantic relations is limited which negatively affects the semantic interoperability of XML data (Tekli et al., 2016).  

Introducing an era of change. Mastering the stages of digital transformation

The trope of an ongoing transformation that would continuously penetrate through all layers of an enterprise was not only understood but communicated early on by Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory as well as PoolParty. The emergence of digital practices introduced a new era of ongoing changes and enabled businesses to modernize legacy processes, strengthen security, and accelerate more efficient workflows. But digital transformation is not only about technology but an internal and external assessment of how an organization uses and manages people, processes, and technology harmoniously.

For internationally operating enterprises like Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory, it was not only about their business strategies and goals but also about a cultural change that challenged the way they do business and perceive objectives.

Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory and PoolParty successfully navigated through these stages of digital transformation, effectively changing the way business is done and internal processes are perceived.

STEP 1:

Digital transformation starts by moving away from analog to digital data governance. This is a task that is increasing in importance since more and more enterprises voice interest in distributing their content outside of typical print or PDF formats. This process, however, consists of a few consecutive stages that require time, careful planning, and constant nurturing. 

STEP 2:

Making the leap from standard columns to context is an achievable part of this transformational process, but not an automatic one. Digital transformation can only be understood as a holistic process that by nature transcends traditional roles like marketing, sales, or customer service. Hence, every member of a digital and interdisciplinary team plays a vital role in not only implementing but understanding and, furthermore, co-creating this task.

 STEP 3:

The next step consists of enriching the already existing data through the use of semantic technologies and constructing new content infrastructures in order to benefit from the provided knowledge graphs. This highly individual step can only come to full fruition in an environment that drives innovation and fosters a digital culture and literacy. Taxonomies open up an array of opportunities for businesses by connecting and understanding the structure and hierarchy of information. Once in place, a structured taxonomy is capable of helping machines understand relationships between all data and further suggest relevant conclusions.

 STEP 4 :

It is important to understand that the process of transformation begins and ends with the engagement and general setup of the customers because as we move from paper to agile spreadsheets and further to smart semantic applications, we gain profound insights into not only the engagement with our customers but the whole process chain supported by digital technology.

.

AI & Taxonomies: Redefining organizations from the inside out

Throughout the long-lasting contact Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory has had with SWC, it became clear that AI and other digital technologies like text mining and the use of taxonomies are at this point far more than merely a technological asset, but an intrinsic force that keeps changing companies from the inside out by breaking isolated data silos and conventional data governance models. The main goal of the Semantic Web is to make content and information more comprehensible and, consequently, more usable. This objective coincides with the primary mission of enterprises like Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory.

By setting up and managing processes that penetrate through the different layers and traditional hierarchies of businesses, it is now possible to not only massively simplify internal communication processes but also to initiate growth far beyond company borders and take important steps towards future digitalization. The key to the successful digital transformation of any enterprise is to be able to dynamically generate comprehensive 360-degree views of core processes and relevant business objects.