Back to the list of Case Studies...

DALIAN 2.0 Media Clipping System for PRNet

For more than a century, daily, systematic analysis of printed media has been an important tool for successful businesses worldwide.

Media clipping companies, using tools suited to the last century, provided the analysis business demanded. All those years, the rustling of pages and jingle of scissors were the constant audio background of media clipping companies’ operations.

Arrival of the digital age healed the callused hands of operators. Fewer and fewer scissors were used as companies switched to scanning printed material. Paper no longer left the scanner room, and reading was done from computer monitors.

But overall processing of newspapers and magazines still required too much human input to automate, so the amount of labor spent by media clipping companies remained largely the same. Early-90s OCR programs worked for letters and faxes, but turned out to be useless when confronted with the complex layout and font variety of newspapers.

In 1997, a Turkish media research company named PRNet approached ABBYY Software House, the manufacturer of FineReader OCR products, with the request to design a system for streamlining the clipping process. Dalian 1.0 went into operation in 1998, delivering subscribers a service previously unheard of. As early as nine in the morning, subscribers could log on to PRNet’s web site, click on their own customized albums, and view a new page with clippings from that very day’s morning newspapers. Only clippings containing this subscriber’s keywords went to his/her albums. Content was delivered as text and pictures in HTML format, allowing the subscriber to copy & paste it into other software for distribution or editing. Pictures were delivered as well. Keywords were highlighted. All major Turkish publications were covered (50 titles). The clippings were preserved in MS SQL Server database for long-term storage and future reference.

All this was achieved with an average staff presence of 14 operators — a fantastic efficiency compared to less-sophisticated systems. The workload was largely shifted to unattended computers: OCR PCs had to be rackmounted 10-units-tall to fit into a single room, with one hot-switchable monitor for control.

When the new version of FineReader OCR came out, PRNet invited ABBYY to migrate Dalian to this new platform. Pursuant to new corporate outsourcing policies, ABBYY transferred the project to ATAPY Software, an IT development company specializing in custom OCR tools. Besides migration, PRNet asked ATAPY to add web-based administration, system statistics and reports, a web client for extended media search, improved output for clippings, and many other features and enhancements.

The new Dalian 2.0 went into operation in 2003, providing media insights to about 80 clients, including the Turkish offices of Alcatel, Compaq, Toyota, Uniliver, Vestel, CNN, Reebok, and Siemens, as well as such local giants as members of the Koç Group and the leading banks of Turkey.

The dramatic improvement in recognition rate, the possibility to employ home-based operators working through web interfaces, and other serious advancements in system functionality and manageability place Dalian 2.0 in the top rank of modern media-clipping software packages.

About PRNet:

PRNet, Turkey, is a Media Monitoring and Analysis company serving over 300 corporate clients.
The company acts as a strategic partner for communication specialists and executives, who aim to develop corporate reputation and who need to assess the results of their communication strategies. PRNet provides access to their online database where customers can search more than 25 thousand clips and 80 million results stored since 2000, survey 4500 pages of newspapers and magazines, view videos of 74 TV channels recorded on a 24/7 basis, and access more than 1000 internet portals.
According to ISO 500 research, 7 of the top 10 companies of Turkey, and 84 of the top 100, prefer PRNet for serving their media-monitoring and industrial information needs.