News

Orbital Software and Convera Join to Power Scotland’s Leading Portal

• 03/05/2001

Orbital Software and its partner, Convera are joining forces to power the leading Scottish Web site, scotsman.com. This joint venture will enable scotsman.com to achieve its vision for the site to become more than a simple repository for data, but rather an Internet portal for knowledge sharing and information retrieval.

In six months scotsman.com has built a community of over 400,000 regular users, building on the news, entertainment and information strengths of its sister newsprint titles, "The Scotsman," "Scotland on Sunday" and "Edinburgh Evening News." Scotsman.com organizes content from over 50 third-party content sources across 10 channels (from business to sports) and delivers twice-daily regional news updates from across the regions of Scotland.

"At scotsman.com we have built on our 183-year heritage of successful publishing to deliver a highly successful online service for Scots and people with an interest in Scotland. Orbital and Convera will provide us with the infrastructure to build on this success and allow our users to exchange and identify the information they are looking for," comments Donald Cameron, Chief Executive of scotsman.com. "We also believe that people are often better routes to answers than files of information and we want to facilitate high levels of interaction between our users."

Using, Organik, Orbital’s flagship product, scotsman.com will set up online communities where members will be able to consult experts and find answers or post questions on subjects ranging from sport to business or even Scottish heritage. Organik records the Q&A dialogue entered into the site, building a store of knowledge accessible to all users.

Convera’s RetrievalWare is also integrated, offering an intelligent, high performance search application that indexes and retrieves text, as well as video, images and audio files. Scotsman.com will provide its users with easy access to the site’s multimedia information repository, including the story of Scotland’s 20th century in sound, vision and text.

Cameron continues, "We need to capture vital information from visitors to our site and to make their knowledge available to other people. If anyone has had an experience of Scotland, we want to hear about it. Although we are custodians of the site, it is designed so that everyone who visits it can help to build it and get value from it. That makes it a pretty powerful and unique resource."