McGraw-Hill’s AccessPediatrics (http://www.accesspediatrics.com), launched on SCM, Silverchair’s web content delivery platform, in May 2011. This innovative online resource for pediatrics residents, students, and educators provides searchable, full-text access to 13 leading McGraw-Hill pediatric medicine textbooks, including Rudolph’s Pediatrics and Current Diagnosis and Treatment: Pediatrics; curricular management tracking and testing tools; more than 40 animations detailing pediatric procedures and exam walkthroughs, from descriptions of anatomy to the details of pathophysiology; Q&A that helps prepare for the United States Medical Licensing Examination as well as the pediatrics specialty board exam; practical skill-building tools; and thousands of images.

Using Silverchair’s renowned semantic architecture, AccessPediatrics employs a customized, evidenced-based user interface design and a powerful semantic search, brings together a diverse array of content assets in one cohesive and compelling information resource, as now recognized by the PROSE awards.

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About Silverchair: Founded in 1993, Silverchair delivers advanced semantic technologies, publishing platforms, and e-learning solutions to scientific, technical, and medical publishers, professional societies, and the federal government. Silverchair is headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia. Additional information is available at www.silverchair.com.

The 2011 winner, Health Diagnostic Laboratory, Inc, will pass the honor to Silverchair Information Systems tomorrow evening as Governor Bob McDonnell and Science Museum of Virginia Chief Wonder Officer, Richard C. Conti present the award to Silverchair Chief Executive Officer, Thane Kerner. Three scientists will also be honored throughout the evening with Virginia’s 2012 Outstanding Scientists Award.

The Governor’s Award for Science Innovation is designed to recognize an emerging company or organization that has made a significant impact in the areas of science, technology, engineering or mathematics. The award celebrates diversity by recognizing a company or organization that inspires innovation and reinforces the global competitiveness of Virginia for businesses that have fewer than 250 employees with focus in the areas mentioned above.
“We have been working vigorously to help our publisher clients embrace product development and innovation, and so it is a great honor for Silverchair to also be acknowledged for internal innovation,” said Silverchair CEO, Thane Kerner.

Silverchair Information Systems, founded in 1993 began as a small two person office that has grown to over 150 employees dedicated to delivering advanced semantic technologies, publishing platforms, and e-learning solutions to scientific, technical, and medical publishers, professional societies, and the federal government. In June 2011, Silverchair launched SCM6, the most substantial upgrade to its SCM web product development platform in company history. With that announcement, eight leading scientific societies simultaneously announced plans to migrate their digital publishing operations to, and develop new product lines on the new platform. Because SCM6 was built using a natively semantic architecture, these publishers have the capability to rapidly produce new product and features, embrace best-of-breed navigation, and receive support for myriad new business models to optimize their content portfolios. Since the release of SCM6, three additional STM publishers have decided to join the SCM6 platform.

With headquarters in Charlottesville, Virginia, Silverchair was recently featured as a fast-growing Job Creator on the Governor’s website as the company continues to expand and bring innovation to the STM & scholarly publishing market.

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www.silverchair.com

The ASME Digital Library is the most extensive resource on mechanical engineering, including more than 158,000 technical papers in 25 journals and 200 conference proceedings spanning from 1970 to the present and more than 130 ASME Press electronic books. ASME publishes approximately 9,000 new papers and 20 new books in the ASME Digital Library annually.

“We chose to move the ASME Digital Library to Silverchair’s SCM6 platform because of its ability to fully integrate all of our content types—journals, proceedings, and ebooks—offering a sophisticated array of semantic technology,” said Philip DiVietro, managing director of ASME Publishing and Unit Support. “Silverchair is the emerging leader in STM publishing technology. We are excited about combining their unique amalgam of technology and product development experience with our content expertise and knowledge of the mechanical engineering field, to develop truly innovative new products and product enhancements to better support the information needs of our diverse members and other stakeholders.”
SCM6 is the latest release of Silverchair’s natively semantic product development and hosting platform. SCM6 supports scientific, technical, and medical (STM) and scholarly publishers, societies, and other organizations to deliver the full array of content formats, functionality, and personalized user experience required by today’s rapidly changing information marketplace.

“We are enthusiastic to be collaborating with ASME, the leader in mechanical engineering, and an organization with a global impact that is advancing technical knowledge across a diverse array of fields, including bioengineering, energy, aerospace, transportation, environmental engineering, construction, and manufacturing,” said Thane Kerner, Silverchair CEO. “The migration of the ASME Digital Library to Silverchair’s SCM6 corresponds with a significant extension of our semantic infrastructure. We have long been recognized for our deep expertise in the life sciences, but we have expanded our semantic systems to support both the physical sciences and engineering. ASME’s forward-thinking, integrated approach to publishing provides the perfect partner for the next step in our semantic roadmap.”

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About ASME: Founded in 1880 as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, ASME is the premier professional membership organization for more than 120,000 mechanical engineers and associated members worldwide. ASME also conducts one of the world’s largest technical publishing operations, offering thousands of titles including some of the profession’s most prestigious journals, conference proceedings, and ASME Press books. Additional information is available at www.asme.org
About Silverchair: Founded in 1993, Silverchair delivers advanced semantic technologies, publishing platforms, and e-learning solutions to scientific, technical, and medical publishers, professional societies, and the federal government. Silverchair is headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia. Additional information is available at www.silverchair.com.

McGraw-Hill’s AccessPediatrics (http://www.accesspediatrics.com), launched on Silverchair’s web content delivery platform in May 2011, won the Web Health Silver Award for Medical Education. This innovative online resource for pediatrics residents, students, and educators provides searchable, full-text access to 13 leading McGraw-Hill pediatric medicine textbooks, including Rudolph’s Pediatrics, 22e and Current Diagnosis and Treatment: Pediatrics, 20e; curricular management tracking and testing tools; more than 40 animations detailing pediatric procedures and exam walkthroughs, from descriptions of anatomy to the details of pathophysiology; Q&A for the Pediatric Board Exam; practical skill-building tools; and thousands of images.

The AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange (http://www.innovations.ahrq.gov), developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and launched on Silverchair’s platform in June 2008, received a Merit Web Health Award for Directory / Ratings / Guides. The AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange offers busy health professionals and researchers a variety of opportunities to share, learn about, and ultimately adopt evidence-based innovations and tools suitable for a range of health care settings and populations.

Both sites utilize Silverchair’s renowned semantic architecture to deliver highly relevant content to healthcare professionals. They employ a customized, evidenced-based user interface design and a powerful semantic search that make them industry leaders for delivering healthcare resources, as now recognized by the Web Health Awards.

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About Silverchair: Founded in 1993, Silverchair delivers advanced semantic technologies, publishing platforms, and e-learning solutions to scientific, technical, and medical publishers, professional societies, and the federal government. Silverchair is headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia. Additional information is available at www.silverchair.com.

“We have learned a great deal in the six years since we launched the original version of PsychiatryOnline,” said APA Publisher Rebecca Rinehart. “The new PsychiatryOnline reflects this knowledge, bringing together all of the APA’s key resources in one place, leveraging semantic enrichment to surface deep content relationships and populate topic collections and providing our readers with time-saving tools and innovative products.”
The new PsychiatryOnline brings the APA’s resources together in a unified digital suite, with integrated search and browse functionality along cross-platform topic collections . The DSM Library, Psychiatric News and each individual journal will retain its own branded website with title-specific search and browse so that APA members and other users can focus on the content of most importance to them. Journal transitioning to the new platform include:

• The American Journal of Psychiatry
• Psychiatric Services
• The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences
• Academic Psychiatry
• FOCUS, The Journal of Lifelong Learning
• Plus, Psychiatric News

The SCM6 platform also enables the APP to optimize its information delivery for general and subspecialty psychiatrists, providing a intuitive user interface and content design that supports an variety of content types including textbooks, reference works, journals, guidelines, CME, patient education, and news. Additionally, users will find psychiatry-tailored topic collections that surface related content from across the array of content on PsychatryOnline.

“Over the past six years, American Psychiatric Publishing and Silverchair have collaborated to realize our shared vision for a fully integrated content portfolio spanning all of the APA’s professional content,” said Thane Kerner, Silverchair CEO. “By integrating APA’s journals and Psychiatric News, the new PsychiatryOnline makes a dramatic leap toward complete portfolio integration and product innovation, enabled by a semantic architecture.”

Enhanced features of the new PsychiatryOnline include:
• Content semantically enriched at deep levels of granularity enables every page as a content discovery dashboard, surfacing topically and functionally related content into user workflows
• A new, semantically-optimized search engine delivers more precise results, and rapid faceting to support retrieval efficiency
• Psychiatry Online delivers a new interface optimized for mobile devices, and provides seamless access to institutional users even when users roam far from the institution’s network.
To view the redesigned site and new products firsthand, visit www.psychiatryonline.org.

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About American Psychiatric Publishing:

American Psychiatric Publishing (APP), a Division of American Psychiatric Association is the world’s premier publisher of books, journals, and multimedia on psychiatry, mental health and behavioral science. We offer authoritative, up-to-date and affordable information geared toward psychiatrists, other mental health professionals, psychiatric residents, medical students and the general public.

About Silverchair:

Founded in 1993, Silverchair delivers advanced semantic technologies, publishing platforms, and e-learning solutions to scientific, technical, and medical publishers, professional societies, and the federal government. Silverchair is headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia. Additional information is available at edit.silverchair.com.

“Tim is a world-renowned speaker and someone who has been thinking deeply at the intersection of publishing and technology for a long time. We are thrilled he has agreed to share his perspective and insight with our clients, partners and other industry stakeholders,” said Silverchair Executive Vice President, Michael Clarke. “Silverchair has been participating at O’Reilly conferences for years and we are delighted to bring a piece of that experience to Silverchair Strategies 2011.”

As the CEO of a dynamic and successful technical publisher and a leading technologist, O’Reilly is the ideal keynote speaker for Silverchair Strategies 2011, which is organized around the themes of content integration, personalization, and product development in the science, technical, and medical (STM) and scholarly information space. The majority of the conference will be organized around a series of case studies, workshops, conversational panels, and provocative presentations—including O’Reilly’s keynote.

According to Oreilly.com, “O’Reilly has been a chronicler and catalyst of leading-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future.” Beyond the success of O’Reilly Media, Tim is widely considered a visionary and trend spotter and is notable for having popularized the term “Web 2.0” in the 2005 essay, “What is Web 2.0.”

Mr. O’Reilly’s presentation will take place on Friday, October 28th at the Chicago Ritz-Carlton. Those interested in requesting an invitation to the conference should visit http://strategies.silverchair.com/ for more information.

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About Silverchair: Founded in 1993, Silverchair delivers advanced semantic technologies, publishing platforms, and e-learning solutions to scientific, technical, and medical publishers, professional societies, and the federal government. Silverchair is headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia. Additional information is available at http://www.silverchair.com.

The SPIE Digital Library is the most extensive research resource on optics and photonics, with more than 320,000 technical papers from SPIE Journals and Conference Proceedings from 1990 to the present and more than 150 SPIE Press books. SPIE publishes approximately 17,000 new technical papers and 15 to 20 new books in the SPIE Digital Library each year.  

“We chose Silverchair as a strategic partner largely because its strong semantic capabilities will enable the SPIE Digital Library to be a truly integrated information portal,” said Eric Pepper, SPIE Director of Publications. “In addition to supporting essential publishing and usage functionality, SCM6 will enable us to draw connections between topically related information across the SPIE corpus, link to valuable content from other sources of interest to the researchers who use our database, and facilitate user personalization. These are exciting future directions for our Digital Library and our many subscribers and users.”

On Silverchair’s SCM6 platform, the SPIE Digital Library will have new features that will assist researchers. SCM6 is the latest release of Silverchair’s natively semantic product development and hosting platform. SCM6 supports scientific, technical, and medical (STM) and scholarly publishers, societies, and other organizations to deliver the full array of content formats, functionality, and personalized user experience required by today’s rapidly changing information marketplace.

 “We are thrilled to be working with SPIE, the leader in applied optical technology, and an organization that is advancing knowledge at the intersection of optical science and engineering,” said Thane Kerner, Silverchair CEO. “The Silverchair hosting of the SPIE Digital Library corresponds with a significant extension of our semantic infrastructure. We have heretofore been best known for our deep expertise in the life sciences. But in fact, we have expanded our semantic systems to support both the physical sciences and engineering. SPIE’s forward-thinking, integrated approach to publishing provides the perfect partner for the next step in our semantic roadmap.”

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About SPIE: SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. Serving approximately 180,000 constituents from more than 170 countries, the Society advances emerging technologies through interdisciplinary information exchange, continuing education, publications, patent precedent, and career and professional growth. SPIE annually organizes and sponsors approximately 25 major technical forums, exhibitions, and education programs in North America, Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific.  SPIE provided over $2.3 million in support of education and outreach programs in 2010.  Additional information is available at www.spie.org.

About Silverchair: Founded in 1993, Silverchair delivers advanced semantic technologies, publishing platforms, and e-learning solutions to scientific, technical, and medical publishers, professional societies, and the federal government. Silverchair is headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia. Additional information is available at edit.silverchair.com.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, August 24, 2011 – Inc. magazine has ranked Silverchair Holdings, Inc. #1992 on its fifth annual Inc. 500|5000, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy—America’s independent entrepreneurs. Online retailer ideeli tops this year’s list. Silverchair Holdings, Inc. joins Spirit Airlines, television maker Vizio, Honest Tea, Dunkin Donuts and Metrokane, makers of the Rabbit corkscrew, among other prominent brands featured on this year’s list.

“Silverchair is very fortunate that our innovations have resonated with healthcare and science professionals worldwide. Our accomplishments are driven by a prodigiously talented team that is committed to improving the flow and effect of professional knowledge. Their skill and effort have allowed us to defy the general economic trends,” said Thane Kerner, CEO of Silverchair Holdings.

Virginia-based Silverchair Holdings, Inc. comprises three core technology companies working to streamline the delivery of education and information in health care: Silverchair Information Systems, which enables STM publishers to innovate and grow by enriching high-value content to build new products and applications; Silverchair Learning Systems, the leading provider of online learning and information systems for the senior care industry; and Semedica, which concentrates on browser-based workflow applications that give information publishers the power to enable their content for the semantic web.

In a stagnant economic environment, median growth rate of 2011 Inc. 500|5000 companies remains an impressive 94 percent. The companies on this year’s list report having created 350,000 jobs in the past three years, and aggregate revenue among the honorees reached $366 billion, up 14 percent from last year.

“Back in 2005, Silverchair Learning Systems was an idea in the mind of our co-founder Bill Glass with five employees sharing a vision to revolutionize the way training was delivered in senior care,” said Mike Mutka, President and COO of Silverchair Learning Systems. “It has been exciting to see our philosophy of innovation and exceptional customer support gain momentum within our industry as we have become the clear market leaders. Inc.’s recognition is gratifying because we now know that our success is evident outside our industry as well.”

Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region, and other criteria, can be found at www.inc.com/5000.

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About Silverchair Holdings, Inc.
Silverchair Holdings, Inc. comprises three core technology companies working to streamline the delivery of education and information in health care: Silverchair Information Systems, which enables STM publishers to innovate and grow by enriching high-value content to build new products and applications; Silverchair Learning Systems, the leading provider of online learning and information systems for the senior care industry; and Semedica, which concentrates on browser-based workflow applications that give information publishers the power to enable their content for the semantic web.
edit.silverchair.com
www.silverchairlearning.com
www.semedica.com

About Inc. and the Inc. 500|5000
Methodology
The 2011 Inc. 500 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2007 to 2010. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2007. Additionally, they had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2010. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2007 is $100,000; the minimum for 2010 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.’s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000, which can be found at www.inc.com/500.

About Inc. Magazine
Founded in 1979 and acquired in 2005 by Mansueto Ventures LLC, Inc. (www.inc.com) is the only major business magazine dedicated exclusively to owners and managers of growing private companies that delivers real solutions for today’s innovative company builders. With a total paid circulation of 710,106, Inc. provides hands-on tools and market-tested strategies for managing people, finances, sales, marketing, and technology. Visit us online at www.inc.com.

About the Inc. 500|5000 Conference
Each year, Inc. and Inc.com celebrate the remarkable achievements of today’s entrepreneurial superstars—the privately held small businesses that drive our economy. The Inc. 500|5000 Conference & Awards Ceremony brings together members of the Inc. community, both a new class of Inc. 500|5000 honorees and the list’s alumni, for three days of powerful networking, inspired learning, and momentous celebration. Please join us September 22–24, 2011, at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, located minutes from downtown Washington, D.C. For more information about the 2011 Inc. 500|5000 Conference & Awards Ceremony and to register, visit www.inc500conference.com or call 866-901-3205.

Silverchair recently announced that eight leading scientific societies had announced plans to migrate their digital publishing operations to Silverchair’s new SCM6 platform. What has Silverchair got that others don’t?

Important Details: One of the big challenges for publishers today is the silo-ization of content. They may publish content in journals, in various types of books, and in an increasing number of ancillary products (e.g. conference proceedings, educational materials, guidelines, news, etc.). They also need to be able to present a unified portfolio, fine-tuned to meet the needs of specific types of end-users, and designed so that the publisher can leverage traffic coming in from a variety of sources, exposing users to a wide set of relevant content from the portfolio. Ultimately, this means having a publishing platform that supports rich, semantically-tagged, XML.

Furthermore, STM publishers want to be able to develop new products, even business models, without the need to spend a lot of money developing their own facilities or wasting a lot of time waiting for a third party vendor to decide that such and such a functionality is worth developing because they can cross-market it to other clients. Cost, agility and innovation are the hallmarks of a winning solution.

But there are several other service and technology providers out there doing similar things. Atypon, EBSCO‘s Dynamed, Highwire Press, and Publishing Technology, for example, are some of the solutions to which publishers have been turning. So what is different about Silverchair?

A clue perhaps comes from the specialities publishers themselves: the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Chest Physicians, the American College of Physicians, the American Medical Association, the American Pharmacists Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS), and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain/Pharmaceutical Press.

As the marketing blurb says, “Built using a natively semantic architecture, SCM6 enables rapid product and feature deployment, best-of-breed navigation and utility for all content types including journals, and support for myriad new business models to optimize publishers’ entire content portfolios.” So Silverchair’s deep medical semantic skills may have been an important determining factor.

Silverchair’s semantic enrichment occurs before the content gets to the platform, by way of a largely automated process that needs only a small amount of manual tuning. This makes a lot of manipulations at the platform level far easier, e.g. the rapid creation of specialist collections of content. Content can be tagged at the level of titles, abstracts, sections, figures, images, and chapters using the Silverchair taxonomy, which is based on 60,000 original terms and 300,000 semantic equivalents that have been mapped to other taxonomies such as SNOMED and NLM’s MeSH, allowing content to be pulled from other sources – such as from NCBI’s databases.

Human tuning is required in order to weight tags so that the retrieval process surfaces the correct content according to the intended audience and product use case. This could, for example, be a generalist physician audience, or some type of surgical specialist. Likewise, it is also important to tune the level of semantic granularity so that the content selection matches the needs of bench scientists vs. clinicians. Is the content going to be used in long form for research purposes or for quick reference at the point of care?

Once the tags have been inserted into the XML it becomes possible to find articles with a similar semantic profile based upon 8-16 summary tags that identify the topics that the article is most about. When users interact with content the system stores the semantic tags associated with viewed content and this information can then be used to populate user interest profiles – a similar approach to those employed by popular consumer sites like Amazon, Pandora, or Netflix. In future, this facility might in turn be used to target promotional advertising, create individualized offers, or even create dynamic user affinity groups.

Implications: According to JBJS, one of one of the adopting publishers, their long-term vision is to use Silverchair’s semantic platform to create an integrated product line, and to boost customer experience by linking between different product silos and different sources of related content. The semantic fingerprinting of content ensure that that users will find highly relevant information surfaced across product lines without being inundated by unwanted results and can navigate to an appropriate sub-set of results. These content sets, and subsets, can be rapidly turned into new products and services offerings – combining, for example, continuing medical education, newsletters, case reports, surgical techniques, and primary research from multiple publications into a customized subspecialty product and alerting service.

We recently reported on AIP‘s decision to focus on publishing its own and certain affiliate journals, outsourcing its publishing services operation, in order to focus more closely on the author and reader needs, as well as testing out new business models, specific to its own vertical (see Insights 23 June 2011, AIP Chooses To Focus On Core Business). Faced with flat library budget projections for the foreseeable future, STM publishers are buckling down to the cold reality that future top-line growth will either come from increasing their market share, or by escaping to adjacent market spaces. Many are opting for the former – less risky, at least in the short term – and investing in new platform technologies to attract authors, drive usage, and develop new business models. Not all publishers will be able to go down this focused disciplinary street. Some will continue to provide less-differentiated services across a wide range of STM areas, whilst others may not be able to afford, or resource from a management point of view, such a radical change in strategic direction. Also, there are perhaps clearer synergies here for professional society publishers, who often have built-in audiences and a range of content sets across a given speciality. Let’s hope that as it grows Silverchair retains its agility, at least long enough to demonstrate whether semantically integrated publishing platforms are the future – or not!

Founded in 1993, Silverchair delivers advanced semantic technologies, publishing platforms and e-learning solutions to scientific, technical and medical publishers and other organisations. We asked Thane Kerner, Co-founder and CEO to tell us about the background to the organisation, and why we should all be thinking ‘semantically’ when it comes to publishing.

Q1. You were a medical journal publisher before founding Silverchair. Did your experience in the medical information arena provide the catalyst for the creation of Silverchair?

It was mostly instinctive. I had been originally pulled into STM from consumer publishing by a society editor who wanted to enliven his journal with a more market-oriented sensibility. And I was lucky enough to guess that the publishing technologies we were experimenting with circa 1990 were going to accelerate change in professional publishing, which had been a relatively staid industry. So two trends underpinned our strategy—if you can call those inchoate notions a “strategy”—the shift in publishing from being product-focused to being market- and customer-focused, and the potential for technological change to substantially change our products and services and our business models. And, I was fascinated by medical information in particular because in many ways it is the most mission-critical, high-value domain of all.

Q2. Silverchair has a large and expanding taxonomy, focussed on the biomedical industry. How important are taxonomies and how can they be reliably developed?

Taxonomies are key infrastructure of the next generation of networked information systems. Just as XML created a media neutral format to express syntactic structure, taxonomies are essential to creating a neutral way to express semantic infrastructure. XML tells systems what a data object is; semantic metadata tells systems what an object is about. The central purpose of the semantic web is dismabiguation, a way to make content descriptors simultaneously comprehensive and exclusive. For example, if I seek to retrieve a content set about “myocardial infarction,” I want the system to include content about “MI” and “heart attack” (and, by the way, “myocardial inFRACtion”), but to exclude content about Michigan. From there, we can develop ontologies, which in simple terms use taxons (root terms in a taxonomy) to create triples–a kind of grammatical statement. We can say, for instance, that “Drug_Name” “Treats” “Infection_Name.” These triples are essentially tiny applications; they make abstract (programmatic) connections between information sets. So they provide the capability to infuse content sets into work flows in real time, they allow systems to develop intelligent real-time user analytics and responses (super-personalization), and they have myriad other potentialities that we are just discovering. The current frontier, business-wise, is to deliver the precisely correct unit of information to a user at precisely the correct moment, which potentially improves efficiency and quality by orders of magnitude.

Silverchair does indeed have what we believe is the most robust biomedical taxonomy ecosystem available. It’s important to distinguish between a classic taxonomy–which is a retrospective classification system that reduces a concept to a single declared nomenclature–and a taxonomical ecosystem delivered to content applications in real time. The former is a helpful starting place, but only that. The distance between a taxonomy and a semantically-optimized information platform is long and complex. Silverchair has spent the past 12 years building out that complete infrastructure and deploying it from end to end, learning first how to do it properly, and then how to do it at scale. Establishing this ecosystem is, to understate it, non-trivial. And while our roots were grown in the fertile soils of biomedical information, we are rapidly building out across STM domains by abstracting the principles, methods, and best practices we’ve learned and created. Currently Silverchair is addressing the physical sciences, engineering, computing, and other core STM domains with our semantic ecosystem approach.

One other important dimension of taxonomies in general and the trajectory of these technologies in our industry: the world is moving beyond enterprise taxonomies and into domain taxonomies. Any content organization working to develop and deploy semantically-optimized information products and services must make a crucial decision in this respect. I am frequently confronted with companies and societies that want to develop an enterprise taxonomy to help them better organize and deliver their content. However, if the normalization process is only enterprise-wide, then it is fatally limited. Information services increasingly offer value based more on enhanced discovery, navigation, usability, and productivity than they do on the underlying content artifacts. Publishers should not make the mistake of a half measure by moving from one silo (the book, journal, etc.) into another slightly larger silo (the organization). STM Information consumers never single-source their content needs organizationally. Ergo, the ability to connect content assets inter-organizationally will drive business models, and the semantic architecture required to drive that is consequently domain-wide rather than enterprise-delimited.

Finally, I’d add that taxonomic and ontologic infrastructure is best delivered in a service architecture. Taxonomies and ontologies are living, breathing, growing, mutating datasets. One doesn’t just create a taxonomy and then turn it on and let it run. It must be continually modified and supplemented, and best practices for updating these datasets require their own sophisticated real-time connections to content origination workflows and user interactions. So economically, it’s quite challenging for any single organization alone to support the specialized skill sets and technologies that create and advance the ecosystem needed to realize the full gamut of business benefits made possible by semantic technologies.

Q3. Silverchair has recently announced SCM6, the new ‘natively semantic product delivery platform’. What are the key advantages of a ‘natively semantic’ platform as opposed to a ‘traditional’ platform?

We’ve been down a winding path on this front. From 1998 through 2007, we created products on previous versions of SCM (also natively semantic; “native semantics” are not new to SCM6) from end to end. A great deal of meticulous (and non-scalable) effort when into creating very high end, bespoke products and services for publishers. We learned how to do it well before we learned how to do it big. We then achieved some tremendous technical breakthroughs in automated enrichment, and decided we would productize our semantic infrastructure, offering taxonomy, enrichment, and other semantic application services to publishers on other platforms. It made a lot of sense based on the theoretical rhetoric of the industry, but at a practical level the theory had not been operationalized. It turned out these other content delivery platforms were not equipped to use the semantically enriched data in meaningful ways. In part, these platforms were not designed to write functionality based on that kind of metadata, but it’s also a reality that the conceptual/ideation skills had not been cultivated.

As we realized that neither the technologies nor the expertise were in place on other platforms, we decided we needed to deliver a high-scale semantic product development platform, one that could support the complete content portfolio with best-of-breed interfaces and functionality, and could use the semantic infrastructure to speed up feature and product deployment.

A platform constructed on a semantic foundation does a lot more than just enable better products. Operationally, it enables an optimized product development process. If you think about classic N-tier systems architecture (data-application-interface), the heaviest investment (time/effort/money) is in the application rules and then the interface. Data was just considered a by-product of traditional production workflow. Semantic architecture inverts that. We make a much larger investment in the data layer, which in turn reduces the investment required in the application and interface layers.

Now, why is that important in our industry? Because the days of the giant build are over. The original giant build was the printing plant: turn it on and run it for 25 years producing exactly the same product output. When the industry initially moved online, the orientation echoed that: we built big platforms that took 24-48 months to plan, develop, and deploy, and then expected these platforms in all their high-scale (but generic) glory to run the same functionality more or less indefinitely. Anyone who is now trying to do effective web/mobile product development on that timescale is doomed. How can a service that was designed for the web three or four years ago and is just being launched today hope to be compelling?

Moreover, where is growth going to come from in the next decade? Institutional budgets are exhausted. The first great wave of web productization in STM has past its zenith. To grow revenue (organically) with the current platforms and models, we’ll have to take budget away from our competitors. That’s expensive and time consuming, and doesn’t make the pie any larger—it just makes margins smaller. So the next big wave of web productization will need to be different. We think the basic themes are [a] service layers that emphasize integration and utility over traditional content IP, [b] new forms of dynamic content mobility that will reach far more deeply into professional and educational workflows, and [c] the revival of individual customers.

So a natively semantic approach is actually appropriate not merely for the contemporary technical milieu, but for the fundamental strategic environment in which information providers all operate. Rapid service and feature iteration is essential. Low-investment experimentation, in an ecosystem where we can instantly absorb and interpret user response and modify, is the product development process that will work in this frenetic atmosphere.

Q4. Do you anticipate that semantic publishing will revolutionise scholarly and professional publishing?

Understand this: the train has left the station. Semantic technologies are already driving product development and marketing all over the web. Quite honestly, professional publishing is typically something of a laggard in adopting market-changing technology infrastructure. Companies and technologies most identified with web leadership—Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Google—have been deploying these technologies for a long time. As has the ultimate canary-in-the-coal-mine web industry: pornography. At our peril we think of our own space as immune to these complex but essential evolutions; we rationalize that perhaps we are too small, or too contextually particular, or that there exists some other dispensation that will allow us to avoid the effort. Developing a semantic footing seems expensive, requires complicated new skills, and, like any infrastructure project, has an opaque ROI. Nonetheless, this wave is inexorable. It’s hard to imagine any major player in the content/knowledge space thriving without developing semantic architectures.

Q5. Who within a publishing organisation should be thinking about semantic technologies and what advice would you give to them?

First, this begins as a business imperative, not as a technology or production initiative. It is a technology that actuates a new set of strategies. Second, a semantic orientation should be foundational, rather than a bolt-on tactic. Centering semantic technologies in post-production data management has wasted more time and money than most other rabbit holes combined. Third, a semantic ecosystem is very difficult to pilot. It’s axiomatic that the value created by semantics increases exponentially with volume of content and desired services or features. Fourth, as I mentioned previously, taxonomies should be approached at a domain (rather than enterprise) dimension. Finding or establishing de facto domain leadership, either as the biggest player or (more likely) as a consortium of leading organizations in a domain will lay the track for a multiplicity of second-order opportunities and models.

Given its importance and its cross-functional implications, senior leadership in strategy, technology, marketing, and editorial must all develop a working understanding of semantic infrastructure and must create organizational momentum for change. It really isn’t easy—it’s just imperative.

Q6. As a member of STM, what are the key benefits STM membership offers for Silverchair?

We certainly value the opportunities we get to exchange perspectives with our colleagues, partners and competitors. Because our business is focused on enabling and supporting the aforementioned shifts in strategic product development, it’s vital that we participate in the idea flow that is generated in the STM context. I firmly believe that the models of the future will originate in creative “co-opetition,” as the axes of value fluctuate and morph. We aspire to contribute commensurately with what we educe, and to keep building intellectually valuable relationships with our counterparts across the industry.