Beyond Search: Content Applications

Content providers and publishers are finding more and more that they don't compete on content, but on what they can do with that content. "Content was king" back in 1997, according to Thomson Corp. Senior Vice President David Turner, in his 2006 National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services presentation ("The Thomson Transformation: Remaking a Global 500 Company," http://www. nfais.org/TurnerNFAIS06.ppt). Now content providers and publishers are moving "up the value pyramid" by competing on applications built on top of a technology platform that sits on top of content. We call these content applications. People often associate content with a search engine and applications with data (and therefore a relational database management system). But if you were designing a platform for content applications today from scratch, you would not use either a search engine or an RDBMS as the starting point. You would start with a representation of semistructured content-stored and indexed efficiently and securely in a content repository. You would also need a powerful, content-focused query/programming language. In addition, you would take the learnings from the world of search engines and the world of databases, add modern content technologies such as XML and XQuery, and come up with a brand new platform