NEDINE: AN INTELLIGENT GLOBAL NEWS PUBLISHING AND
DISTRIBUTION SERVICE BASED ON WEB SERVICES AND
PEER-TO-PEER TECHNOLOGIES
Markus Schranz
Research & Development, pressetext Nachrichtenagentur GmbH, Josefstaedter Str. 44,Vienna, Austria
Keywords: Web Services, global news distribution, Peer to peer architecture.
Abstract: Modern Internet technologies have been opening innovative aspects in research for more than two decades
and entrepreneurs and pioneers have been transferring latest technical developments to successful
businesses. Business oriented application domains like media get increasingly interested in applying such
modern technologies. The specific application domain news publishing and news distribution is facing
significant performance requirements and high loads of information handling while transferring hundreds of
thousands of messages daily to the research and commercial auditorium. Although communication
technologies are well employed by modern organizations to generate, publish and distribute their
information, specific application domains like online news publishing and distribution involve multinational
and multilingual requirements and enormous amounts of data to be transported. This paper discusses an
approach that integrates news agency services from existing European organizations supported by
University research in the are of global information services, distributed information management and AI in
order to form an intelligent multinational business news publishing and distribution network, based on Web
Services and a peer-to-peer inter-agency communication network.
1 INTRODUCTION
By using the Internet to reach hundreds of millions
of people all over the world mass distribution of
information has come to a new level. Electronic
publishing has introduced a wide application range
within the information management field, including
the digitisation of ancient archives, the
manageability and availability of large amounts of
data or the visualization and provision of contents to
the open public(Paepen, 2002; Schranz 2004).
Modern intelligent approaches have enriched the
field of electronic publishing with the research
results of information retrieval methodologies,
eLearning, theories of infocracy, security, privacy,
semantic relations and metadata management
towards the Semantic Web (Berners-Lee, 1998).
Recent research work within the EU-funded project
NEDINE (Nedine, 2004) focuses on the creation and
the conception of an intelligent news publishing and
distribution network consisting of existing local
news agencies that use modern Internet and
distributed computing technologies to build up a
new kind of multinational and multilingual news
distribution service. Research fields such as network
communication (Yu, 2004) have been involved to
create a scaleable peer-to-peer architecture, artificial
intelligence is utilized to identify the most relevant
related news articles within the multinational Nedine
service. The vector space model (Salton, 1993;
Wong, 1985) has been utilized to provide easy
access to related and most relevant business news.
This paper is focused on the integration of
modern Internet technologies such as Web Services
(Haas, 2002) and peer to peer architectures (Birman,
2003) to create a scalable and high traffic
information exchange and distribution network. A
brief introduction to the investigated application
domain is presented in section 2. Requirements
analysis and the systems architecture is described in
section 3. As proof of concept the prototype
implementation and innovative features are
presented in section 4. A brief summary and an
outlook to further development and practical use
conclude the paper.
169
Schranz M. (2005).
NEDINE: AN INTELLIGENT GLOBAL NEWS PUBLISHING AND DISTRIBUTION SERVICE BASED ON WEB SERVICES AND PEER-TO-PEER
TECHNOLOGIES.
In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on e-Business and Telecommunication Networks, pages 169-172
DOI: 10.5220/0001414301690172
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

2 BUILDING A NETWORK OF
NETWORKS
The application domain we are focusing on has built
a business on top of the technological features and
basic services available on the Internet: Several PR-
companies and news agencies in Europe have
utilized modern synchronous and asynchronous
Internet technologies such as web-based information
access frontends for business news archives or
email-based mass news distribution or content
provision for next generation user devices. A media
industry has emerged that uses complex and
technologically challenging Internet services to
create, aggregate, exchange, publish and distribute
current business news.
The discussed project has been initiated to build
a network to integrate multiple European national
information sources consisting of participating news
agencies, PR agencies and independent journalists
into an international information service for news
professionals and decision makers. Existing services
are based on modern Internet technologies like Web
application servers holding the business logic in the
services middleware (Cvitkovich 2005) and
maintaining a local network of content providing
editors and commercial customers as well as
thousands of subscribers. Each business news
service provides a set of features to these specific
user groups that need to be normalized and shared
within the integrated network of media partners.
Technologically, recent implemented services
lack homogenous implementation models, data
structures and communication protocols. With
modern Internet technologies like Web Services for
the information exchange and P2P architectures to
manage a scalable integration of several local
service providers a meta-network has been designed
within the scope of the project NEDINE.
The implemented network discussed within this
paper is targeting at the integration of such business
cases, thus allowing news agencies of different
European countries to share contents and exchange
business news towards an integrated network for
news aggregation, creation and dissemination. Aside
from the obvious business benefits of such a service
integration, there are necessary steps to be taken to
technically and organizationally bring the services
and the systems of the existing news agencies to an
integrated network. Beyond this, further
development shall attract additional agency partners
throughout Europe to join the network in order to
(1) have access to relevant business news at an
international level
(2) to offer a distribution and dissemination interface
for their customers that provide news to the network
3 TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE
Internet technologies in the area of business news
distribution involves technical features to manage
scalability and performance in mass information
provision (millions of page impressions per month)
and mass distribution (millions of electronic mails
sent per day).
The goal is to set up a sophisticated news
platform and a high performing distribution network
based on convenient digital news exchange
technologies. Experiences from local providers give
figures of hundreds of thousands of electronic mails
per day and about the same amount of visits to the
online business news archives (Web presentations).
NEDINE has also been preparing for different
submission channels by using standardized data
formats like XML news applications
(NewsML(IPTC 2003)).
3.1 Requirements Analysis
In order to build a pan-European network of
business news brokers, we have been concentrating
on common features and identified technological
concepts shared by the participating news agencies
within the NEDINE project consortium. The news
agencies manage their content platforms by
providing news of different areas of interest via
typical Internet protocols and interfaces. All partners
utilize Web servers as part of their service. External
resources like national and international content
providers are used by the agencies to enrich the
contents for the national platforms.
The integration work was started in the
requirements analysis by identifying and describing
the existing platforms and services in order to come
up with a feasibly information exchange interface
and an integrated network service. The integrated
news distribution network includes several services
that originates from different sources: some are
provided by the existing local services and others are
provided by the integrated network capabilities and
features. In order to fulfil the multilingual and
multinational requirements of the integrated news
distribution network, existing solutions needed to be
adapted and new software had to be designed and
implemented.
Technologically, the legacy applications at the
previously existing systems provided only a subset
of the required functionality of the designed
multinational and multilingual news distribution
service and therefore needed to be extended with the
some unified features: a unified access to local
articles, the standardized distribution of foreign
ICETE 2005 - GLOBAL COMMUNICATION INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND SERVICES
170

articles and a unified presentation of network
articles.
Table 2: Requirements analysis – Services available
locally and in the integrated network
Local system
Services Data Design and Processing
News creation
and
management
Handled in relational database schemata
Manipulated by web-based content
management engines
News
aggregation
Aggregation of third party information
(b2b news exchange);
Upload of business news by customers;
Handled by local protocols, mainly
web-based applications
News
distribution
Handled by email services to individu-
ally managed profiles of subscribers
Integrated network
News
presentation
XML-based, mainly web-oriented
interfaces to provide free access to
business news via Web browsers
Multinational
distribution
Aggregate business news from other
partners and use local distribution
International
enrichment
Provide most relevant semantically
related news for each article; focus on
local strength and partner enrichments
Multilingual
news
distribution
Provide business news for all
subscribers and opinion leaders in
targeted business languages
Multinational
and -lingual
news service
Offering multilingual and international
business news tailored to the individual
needs of the subscriber for media access
3.2 Architectural details
The requirements analysis has shown the need for a
scaleable integration of exiting systems with little
intervention and adaptation to the heterogeneous
software components. The final decision taken in the
project is based on a peer to peer network which is a
unique way to create a network for news exchange
between European news agencies. New technologies
like NewsML, Web Services via SOAP or XML in
general, have been used to create this decentralized
system and connect it to all participants.
The architectural concepts handle data manage-
ment, publishing interface (main focus on web
technologies using web application servers) and the
interface connections. The interfaces between the
communicating peers and the interfaces between a
peer and an existing local system are defined in
detail by Web Service descriptions. The WSDL
(W3C,2001) details are out of scope of this paper.
Every news agency is only aware of the SOAP
interface of the peer that is directly assigned to it.
Existing services use modern web services to
retrieve remote business news information to be
published by Internet technologies for the local
service and/or distributed business news via local
channels and the network for remote distribution.
The peer to peer concept was chosen since
technically all current and future network partners
can be equipped with the same piece of software.
The network communication can be handled within
the peer logic, only the interface between the peer
and the existing service needs to be implemented by
the joining partner. All activities within the
multinational and multilingual network are triggered
by the actions of one of the participating partners.
The communication types within the system include
Service registration, information upload,
multinational news distribution requests and news
enrichment requests.
3.3 Use Cases
Based on the requirements, the technical architecture
and the communication types the created NEDINE
network architecture can be explained in different
use cases and possible scenarios during service
utilization. To demonstrate Web services and peer to
peer communication in action we chose a specific
scenario on delivering a business news item
multinationally in multiple languages.
The originating network partner (in Figure 1
named CIA) sends several messages to its peer, one
per language (Czech and English, in this specific
case), each with a request for enrichment.
Figure 1: Use Case “article distribution”
The answer to this message will contain links to a
set of articles, those related to the one in the message
both locally and in the countries supporting the
ČIA
(CZ,DE,EN)
SITA
(SK,EN)
PTE
(DE,EN)
NEDINE
Pee
r
NEDINE
Peer
NEDINE
Peer
1. Enrichment
2.
Enrichme
nt (EN)
7. EN,CZ
Subscriber
7. EN
Subscriber
3.
4.
6.
2. Enrichment
(EN)
3.
7. EN
Subscriber
6.
NEDINE: AN INTELLIGENT GLOBAL NEWS PUBLISHING AND DISTRIBUTION SERVICE BASED ON WEB
SERVICES AND PEER-TO-PEER TECHNOLOGIES
171

language of the article, in the same language. After
several enrichment processes (per language and
country), the result set has to be merged to one final
result set.
The originating network partner sends a message
to its peer with a push request containing a push set
with all the articles in the different languages. The
answer to this message indicates whether the article
has been effectively pushed into the countries
supporting at least one language of the article (but in
all the languages supported that match with the
languages of the article).
The receiving network partners (in Figure 1: PTE
and SITA) send a message to their peer with a
polling request and receive pairs of an article (the
article in the initial push request, in the use case) and
a set of articles, those related to the other article in
the pair either locally or in the originating country
(in the use case, CZ), in one language.
4 CONCLUSIONS
The main goal in our research has been the creation
of a business-oriented intelligent business news
publishing and distribution network, engaging
modern Internet technologies such as Web Services
and P2P networking. Beside the technological
challenges of using state-of-the-art Internet
technologies the approach is highly driven by
industrial and commercial ideas. The research
experiences from project partners have supported the
creation of a well-defined service architecture, a
communication and interaction model and specific
network features that lead to a service result that is
more than just the connection of existing business
news distribution services.
XML expertise and system architecture experts
for high performance distributed systems cooperate
in this project to provide a platform for multinational
business information exchange.
Technically, the network integration has been
defined and its functionality and availability is
proven in running prototypes, demonstrating the
business opportunities at several running sites yet.
On the business side NEDINE produces a digital
news distribution service, connecting existing news
providers with new markets. The focus is on the
efficiency of content aggregation and distribution, in
order to provide an affordable solution for interested
partners in participating countries.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Nedine research documentation has been
evaluated by the Technical University of Vienna,
lead by Prof. Schahram Dustdar and Christian
Platzer. This work was partially funded by the EU
eContent project NEDINE (News Distribution
Network, EDC-22225).
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