And that story is particularly relevant to the fascinating conference that I was attending. Last week’s seminar on “Ready for Web 3.0?” organized by ALPSP and chaired by Louise Tutton of Publishing Technologies was just what the doctor ordered in terms of curing us of the idea that we still have time to consider whether we embrace the semantic web or not. It is here, and in scholarly publishing terms it is becoming the default embedded value, the new plateau onto which we must all struggle in order to catch our breath while building the next level of value-add which forms the expectation of users coming to grips with a networked information society today. And from the scholarly world it will spread everywhere. I will put my own slides from the introductory scene-setting on this site, but if you can find any of the meaty exemplar presentations from ALPSP (it is worth joining them if they are going to do more sessions of this quality) or elsewhere then please review them carefully. They are worth it.

Particularly noteworthy was a talk by Professor Terri Attwood and Dr Steve Pettifer from the University of Manchester (how good to see a biochemistry informatician and a computer scientist sharing the same platform!). They spoke about Utopia Documents, a next generation document reader developed for the Biochemical Journal which identifies features in PDFs and semantically annotates them, seamlessly connecting documents to online data. All of a sudden we are emerging onto the semantic web stage with very practical and pragmatic demonstrations of the virtues of Linked Data. The message was very clear: go home and mark-up everything you have, for no one now knows what content will need to link to what in a web of increasing linkage universality and complexity. At the very least every one who considers themselves a publisher, and especially a science publisher, should read the review article by Attwood, Pettifer and their colleagues in Biochemical Journal (Calling International Rescue: Knowledge Lost in the Literature and information Landslide  http://www.biochemj.org/bj/424/0317/bj4240317.htm) Incidentally, they cite Amos Bairoch and his reflections on Annotation in Nature Precedings (http://precedings.nature.com/documents/3092/version/1) and this is hugely useful if you can generalize from the problems of biocuration to the chaos that each of us faces in our own domains.

Two other aspects were intriguing. Utopia Documents had some funding from the European Commission, EPSRC, BBSRC, the University of Manchester and, above all, the BJ’s publisher, Portland Press. One expects the public bodies to do what they should be doing with the taxpayer’s cash: one respects a small publisher putting its money where its value is. And in another session, on the semantic web collaboration between the European Respiratory Society and the American Thoracic Society, called felicitously “Breathing Space”, we heard that the collaborators created some 30% of the citations in respiratory medicine, and that their work had the effect of “helping their authors towards greater visibility”. Since that is why the industry exists, it would seem that the semantic promise  underpins the original publication promise. Publishers should be creating altars for the veneration of St Tim Berners Lee and dedicating devotions to the works Shadbolt and Hall, scholars of Southampton.

Sadly they are not, but coming out of this day of intense knowledge sharing one could not doubt that semantic web, aka Linked Data, had arrived and taken up residence these several years in scientific academe. Now if it will only bite government information and B2B then we shall be on our way. And, as Leigh Dodds of Talis reminded us, we shall have to learn a new language on that way. Alongside new friends like ontologies  and entity recognition and RDF, add RDFa, SKOS (simple knowledge organizing systems to you!), XCRI education mark-up, OpenCalais (go to Thomson Reuters for more), triples, Facebook Open Graph, and Google Rich Snippets. Even that wonderful old hypertext heretic Ted Nelson got quoted later in the day: “Everything is deeply intertwingled”.  And lets remember, this is not a “lets tackle these issues at our own pace when we think the market is ready” sort of problem: it is a “we are sinking under the weight of our own data and the lifeboat was needed yesterday” sort of a problem. Publishers must tackle it: if we learn how to resolve it without intermediaries then we certainly shall not need publishers.

After the previous week’s heady adventures it felt natural to seek anonymity . And where better to do that than in the bowels of the European Commission as an evaluation rapporteur , quietly sifting the hopeful and hopeless proposers of technology projects in a selection process so scientifically refined that the winners might be described as truly opaque – the people for whom no selectorial prejudice might be entertained .Very dull. And then , taking my Blackberry outside the building for the Commission equivalent ( an info-fix?) of a smoking break , I discovered the joyous news that Thomson Reuters and Complinet had done the deal .

Joyous ? Yes , they need each other at this juncture . Often when major conglomerate players meet maturing ex-start-ups the romance is around trophy assets , scale and exit . And of course these are all elements here . But there is also another element which is much more exciting . Thomson Reuters Markets is in every financial services institution worth thinking about . Thomson Reuters Law division is in every law and tax unit worth thinking about . The one area that unifies these markets more intensely than any other is , as we hesitatingly emerge from recession , compliance with the new rule books of re-regulated financial marketplaces . Thomson Reuters need to have a strategy in place that brings new service values into play across the huge datasets held in its distinctly different Markets and Law operating units . Complinet has been doing that bridgework effectively for 12 years .

When I first went to visit Complinet in Putney in the late 1990s they were a revelation . In the first instance they had nothing on board that sounded like “publishing ” . While some of their people had some sales experience in information companies – including Thomsons- no one talked the structural and process talk of publishing . From the start this was a service-orientated development , and while we did not use the word then , this was all about “workflow”. The object was to put alongside compliance officers and operational managers a service environment for risk management and reduction . So it seemed quite natural that one of the first people I interviewed in the business was a former enforcement inspector from a regulatory agency . Not research-based ? Concerned with adding value to the working environment ? Service -driven thinking ? This company , by the time I had known it for  5 years , was ticking all the boxes for me in terms of what we now understand as value-added “network publishing “.

But growing up in a hostile or unregarding society is always difficult . Other publishers confided to me that they thought Complinet’s business model ,( which then as now had a consultancy element ) was impure (!). In order to succeed the company would have to succeed in the US as well as Europe – a notoriously difficult migration for small British companies . Some content providers were unwilling to license datasets , while others , including some Asia-Pacific exchanges , did not have their regulations in usable formats and needed help . And where did the business model stop : Complinet always took a full service view of its niche , which meant audit of compliance updates and the educational processes by which management and regulator can be sure that changes , once logged , are familiar to operating staff . In other words , Complinet was prepared to look at the whole workflow of compliance in its sector , not just the bits that had law or tax documentation in them . Since their competitors were companies like Wolters Kluwer who were obsessed by the research need and not by the workflow , Complinet were able to establish themselves and grow . Now everyone is obsessed by the workflow .

This is a coming of age in another sense  as well . This is the first sale in the information sector of an integrated services company of any size . Initially the publishers all bought service software companies who sold to end users , and tried ( sometimes not very hard ) to bolt these on to their information assets . It seldom worked . This is not to say that the purchases were wrong : some were brilliant ( and Wolters Kluwer made some notable buys in Europe in this area ) . It was simply that the cultures of software development and research information sales were totally different , and all too often purchasers did not know how to integrate them , or believed that they should stand alone within a group context so that shareholders could clearly assess the contribution of the acquisition . Mercifully those days have passed , but some major players are still left with technology buys whose relevance to other activities is now a mystery !

Thomson Reuters have not been like that , but they , as well as Reed-Elsevier ( WestLaw and Lexis ) have seen the need to migrate to the law and tax office workflow but found it harder to accomplish in practise , especicially during the recent difficult years when subscription revenues for reseach database products were being challenged by traditional professional subscribers . But if you subscribe , as I do , to the UK expert Richard Susskind’s view of the decline of the lawyer , then players like Lexis and Westlaw should be moving across to help end-users ( in this case compliance officers in banks ) to manage their own regulatory practise destiny . And empowering their law firm advisors to unwind and customize these solutions for them . We cannot at once be within a wholly networked economy yet seek to preserve the business relationships of the pre-internet age . Complinet is a child of the networked  age – it can now complete its growth phases in a much larger incubator , and help its new host to change as well in the process.

The Thomson Reuters markets division will become two simplified platforms by the autumn , dealing with enterprize users on the one hand , and individual users and small operators on the other . These platforms will be web-based , and the Thomson Reuters servers will be able to be moved alongside  client servers to ensure lower operational costs . The web -based environments clearly are designed to appeal to a new generation in the industry which joined since trading platforms were in place , as well as providing a contrast with the Bloomberg insistence on its dedicated terminals ( Shades of the dedicated Lexis box ! )

And something else as well . Andrew quotes Devin Wenig, the CEO of Thomson Reuters Markets , as saying ” The industry is a hugely different place from where it was in April 2008 ( when the Thomson Reuters merger took place ) and we think a lot of changes are permanent and structural. Big banks are disapearingbut we’ve created 1000 new accounts in …six months ”

And there is surely the essence . Players in rapidly restructuring networked markets will themselves have to be slimmer , do more on less and enable their clients to do more in the network at least for the same pricing . And that new generation of clients will expect a  greater fluency in customization and personalization  along with better risk management and improved collaboration features ( the launch of Eikon ) as well as interfaces to news and information ( like Insider ) which source video as well as text and allow brokers to offer analysis on video to their clients across the platform .

In short , Thomson Reuters are , with a few exceptions , facing very similar issues to those faced by a Pearson in education , or an Elsevier in STM . And from here on in the parallelism ceases and turns into convergence . Thomson Reuters announced a deal last week to bring Palantir’s QA Studio software to its platforms . This type of quantitative analysis allows data exploration , do pattern identification , test alpha strategies and collaborate . This pushes on with the developments in data mining began with ClearForest three years ago , and again parallels what is alreday happening ( Palantir’s markets are the intelligence , defense and law enforcement communities  ! )

Where does the next push come ? Well , data management is now crucial , and so is compliance and risk management/reduction . And that sounds just like the issues facing diagnostic systems in the medical marketplaces . Often in financial markets there is too much news , and it is insufficiently auto or machine analysed , and human intervention takes too long : this points towards further pressure for automated news tagging so that it can be submitted directly to computerized trading systems . And here another common broad market problem occurs . Users and regulators begin to exert pressure at the lowest levels of data organization for common standards to emerge  ( XBRL would be the case study in the finance field ). This moves the competition zone up a level , but that competitive element must remain because it drives everything forward . Without it , common standards turn into a reason for not changing anything . So play up , lads and play the game ! We still have to tackle workflow and process improvement before the end of this long information industry day !