USATODAY.com Selects Applied Semantics to Power Editorial System; Automatic Categorization Software to Bolster Editors' Productivity at USATODAY.com.

LOS ANGELES -- Applied Semantics, Inc., a leading software tools and applications provider for unstructured information management, today announced that USATODAY.com has licensed the Applied Semantics News Series, an integrated set of enhanced content management applications developed specifically for the publishing industry. USATODAY.com is using the Applied Semantics products to add automatic categorization capabilities to its XML-based editorial system to increase the productivity and efficiency of its editorial staff responsible for pushing news content onto its web site, one of the most popular, highly-trafficked news sites on the Internet.

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USATODAY.com is using Categorizer, a categorization engine within the Applied Semantics News Series, to assist editors in categorizing news stories. In addition, the Concept Tagger will be used to enhance content on the USATODAY.com library archives.

Currently, a team of editors manually categorizes and indexes news content -- a laborious and costly process. By supplementing the editors' manual efforts with automated categorization and taxonomy tools, the Applied Semantics' solution streamlines news content processing on USATODAY.com, making relevant information more rapidly accessible to its reader base. Using the Applied Semantics products, editors can increase their throughput while maintaining a high level of accuracy in their categorization results.

"Applied Semantics' software allows editors to get news into the hands of our online readers quickly and with a minimum of effort," said Kinsey Wilson, editor-in-chief at USATODAY.com. "The software's automatic categorization allows editors to focus more time on the story and less on the mechanics of publishing."

"Categorization improves retrieval and leads users to the information they need quickly," said Sue Feldman, research vice president for content management and retrieval software at IDC. "While publishers have always realized the importance of sorting their information into meaningful categories, the process was time-consuming, expensive and labor-intensive. Furthermore, manual processes delay the availability of the news unacceptably. The world today requires news delivery in real time. USATODAY.com is wise to implement a solution that speeds up the process so that they can continue to deliver accurately targeted news at today's pace."

"We are thrilled to provide USATODAY.com with powerful tools to help their editors make quicker and better decisions that ultimately improve the quality and time-to-market of its content for its readers," said Jordan Libit, CEO of Applied Semantics. "Integrating the Applied Semantics News Series into USATODAY.com's editorial workflow validates the strength of our technology and the applicability of our ontology-based products to content production environments. We are pleased to have been selected by this prestigious organization to power their next-generation editorial system. Our strategy is to continue to deliver new, innovative software solutions to the publishing industry and other vertical markets."

"Editors at USATODAY.com currently process thousands of news articles per month, where split seconds in processing time can be critical to determining the value of a piece of content to a reader," said Adriaan Bouten, vice president of technology and business development at USATODAY.com. "Deploying reliable and high-performance categorization technology is essential to the success of our online site."

"Having evaluated multiple alternatives, we selected Applied Semantics based upon its fast deployment and integration, large volume scalability of real-time content, and XML-friendly platform. Additionally, other types of categorization solutions required manually building large sets of rules or document training sets -- a level of up-front preparation that is too time-prohibitive for us."

Applied Semantics News Series is powered by CIRCA Technology, a proprietary semantic engine that employs the use of an ontology, or database of millions of concepts and relationships between concepts, to 'read' and 'assign meaning' to any piece of unstructured content by building a profile of the key meanings residing on a page. Built by a team of computational linguists and lexicographers, this ontology serves as a massive knowledge base used by Applied Semantics products to make categorization, summarization, and metatagging of news articles and many other forms of content easy and highly accurate.

Since the ontology covers millions of broad and deep concepts, it is highly compatible with the wide range of news content handled by publishers. Applied Semantics News Series bundles powerful content categorization, summarization, and metatagging software with industry standard taxonomies like IPTC and XML standards such as NewsML and PRISM. The result is a series of productivity application services that easily integrates into publishers' existing editorial, wire, syndication, library and archive systems.

About Applied Semantics

Applied Semantics uses a large scale ontology, or knowledge base of concepts and their relationships, to bring semantic understanding to the processing of unstructured information. Applied Semantics provides software products and services that improve business processes for publishing, enterprise applications, and Internet infrastructure markets by automating content tagging, categorization, and summarization for more effective information sharing and retrieval. Founded in 1998, Applied Semantics provides solutions that integrate easily into existing application environments, including enterprise portal deployments, content and document management systems, CRM, and search applications. The company was recently named one of the "100 Companies That Matter" by KMWorld Magazine. For more information, visit http://www.appliedsemantics.com/ .

About USATODAY.com

USATODAY.com is an award-winning news and information site on the Internet. More than 28 million monthly visitors experience comprehensive, convenient USA TODAY news and information through interactive features, information graphics and multimedia functions including audio, video and live Webcasts. USATODAY.com has more than 200,000 pages of breaking stories in News, Money, Sports, Life, Technology and Weather -- updated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. USATODAY.com is owned by Gannett Co., Inc. . For more information, please visit www.usatoday.com .

For further information, please contact JP Schuerman of Schuerman Communications, [phone], or mobile, [phone], [e-mail], for Applied Semantics, Inc.

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Contact: JP Schuerman of Schuerman Communications, [phone], or mobile, [phone], [e-mail], for Applied Semantics, Inc.

Website: http://www.usatoday.com/

Website: http://www.appliedsemantics.com/