Okay, so by now we've accepted the recommendations of the first panel that there is a great opportunity in rich data: how does one actually go about exploiting this opportunity? The event's second panel, chaired by Jeff Cutler, General Manager of the SIIA Content Division, focused on real-world examples of how rich data is helping publishers to succeed with technology-enabled content. As Jeff pointed out the stakes for publishers are being raised every day by the general content and computing environment of the Web - more than twelve million users signed up for Yahoo!'s new XML-enabled weblog feed service on myYahoo! in the first day alone, while various databases had a hard time locating the details of the ABM/SIIA seminar yet Google had it right on top of its search results. There is little "whether" in the need to respond to this environment in which individuals and institutions are today's leading publishers, only appropriate "whens."

Fortunately William Pollak, President and CEO of American Lawyer Media, demonstrated that a strong response to this challenge can occur in even mainstream business publishing companies when past presumptions about what can succeed in publishing are laid aside. After an initial venture into database-oriented publishing under the tutelage of "old hands" from legal publishing that knew very little about the new world of online publishing, they brought on a staff that knew little about legal publishing but a lot about what it took to make a rich data product succeed. The result was VerdictSearch, a brilliantly executed online service that collects trial information from attorneys, packaging it and elementizing it to the "n"th degree in a carefully designed database so that it can be as useful as possible to as many audiences and purposes as possible. Their "data aware" editorial process enables VerdictSearch to make it easy for attorneys to find case law applying to their own cases, to profile attorneys that they will be facing in upcoming trials, to market their services for appeals cases to specific targets - all delivered through a variety of channels and alliance to maximize the usefulness of the content in contexts that matter most to their users. Getting an editorial process that supports careful indexing of content is perhaps one of the greatest challenges in this new environment, but by sticking to the "nine little ways" to make money with rich data rather than risking all on one or two big money-making ideas American Lawyer Media has the luxury of a highly diversified revenue channel with client-generated content that is nearly impossible to replicate.

By contrast Dr. Louis Diamond, Medical Director of Thomson Medstat services a diverse population of professionals all interested in one group that contributes content only indirectly - patients. Medstat does not do a lot of custom work on their content collection but instead focuses on developing multidimensional access for more than seventy large companies, 20 U.S. states, the Federal government, health plans, pharmaceutical vendors and hospitals. Examining patient data for claims information, results of treatments for patient populations, demographics and trends makes this service indispensable for their broad client base. When rich data is central to your product, repurposing for multiple clients needs becomes both essential and highly profitable. Terrence Meacock, President, Jobson Meetings Group of Jobson Publishing, focuses on repurposing education services for the medical community means that rich data can facilitate repurposing of content that's under intense medical and regulatory scrutiny: get the courseware wrong and you can go to jail! For Jobson, rich data means having a variety of ways to control content quality and to support flexible sponsorship arrangements for major pharmaceutical companies. John Ware, SVP and General Manager for Reed Construction Data's RS Means product, integrates construction cost data and client data via third-party applications to provide "4-D" drawings of construction projects - 3-D site diagrams with data from RS Means available contextually with specific drawing objects. While this can lead to "mind-numbing" conversations about geekish things such as object-oriented programming models and a host of acronyms, this toolkit approach for third party developers provides a locked-in approach to value that's hard to displace.

Four different approaches in four different market sectors - and four different success stories showing how rich data can provide a winning plan for locking in highly profitable approaches to profitable databases that stray afar from traditional publishing models. There's no one "right" way to succeed with rich content, and no one right way to start with it, except perhaps to stick with markets that you know in the beginning to work out the technical, client and internal cultural issues. The thing that struck me most about this session is how those organizations that came from a strong traditional publishing culture had to put aside their old ways to come up with not just new technology but new ways to view their editorial functions that were at least as oriented towards data acquisition and disciplines such as taxonomies and categorization as text and fact delivery. It's a bit as if the "dot com" wave took its time reaching this relatively protected sector of the publishing industry and then caught up with a vengeance as B2B ads trailed off rapidly - only to find that the wealth of talent and techniques available helped them to make a transition into high-value database publishing far more effectively than many of their consumer media brethren have managed. Sometimes it does pay to let others go before you.

What was not addressed with any real depth in this event was the complex interplay between the ad-supported online environment and the database environment that's likely to become a much more important part of this environment as it evolves. There's still a strong tendency in trade publications to keep ad sales in the traditional paid-circulation model and leave online content endeavors in a pure subscription model. As demonstrated at last month's InfoCommerce 2004 conference, databases and ads for business content are hardly incompatible concepts. The combination of ad sales and database capabilities may yield far more revenues than these publishers have explored to date. Companies like ECNext that provided a presentation at the ABM/SIIA event are also well aware that rich data can yield more contextual placement of databased content in Web search engine results - another factor left largely unexplored by these panels. Also largely ignored was the role of copyright management controls in a rich data environment - perhaps because these products are largely subscription oriented and not yet confronting the emerging realities of content objects that are easily redistributed by their clients. ValeoIP provided an interesting and simple approach to copyright management in their presentation that is highly relevant to database publishers, but again the perceived need for these kinds of controls seems to lag in the rich data camp. As object-oriented approaches to rich content delivery take hold, this is likely to change.

As the crowd broke up to head on its way, it was evident that this was a meeting of two publishing cultures - one driven more by adapting traditional publishing models to advanced technology and another that's lived with advanced online content delivery for many years and is trying to take content to the next level for their individual and institutional clients as rapidly as possible. It's not necessarily a story of the late adapters struggling to avoid extinction: by having been protected from the need to change radically for so many years many business-oriented publishers can benefit from years of experience to position their publications very effectively in a rich data environment with little immediate fear of replacements for their niche interests waiting in the wings. But the culture changes and advanced skill sets required to make this transition may yet leave many of these publishers struggling to succeed in a rich data environment. The change to client-centric rich data publishing is inevitable for most publishers, but those who leave the door open for others to climb the supposedly high barriers to entry are likely to find themselves waiting for the next big trend - in some other industry.