Norwegian Government goes live with major online information management solution

• NetworkedPlanet's topic maps-based platform links together over 300,000 web pages across 17 Government departments
• Next-Gen TMCore solution provides rapid access for both content editors and public users at www.government.no

The Norwegian Government has gone live with a major new information management solution to power its national website - www.government.no. The solution uses NetworkedPlanet's TMCore topic maps technology to link together over 30,000 'documents', consisting of more than 300,000 web pages from 17 ministries, providing an intelligent navigation tool for the entire site. The implementation will make it significantly easier for visitors to the website - including the media and professionals, as well as the general public - to locate key documents, such as reports, policy and reform papers, background information, or news releases.

The new solution will also allow staff from the Norwegian Government's 17 ministries - such as education, environment or immigration, as well as the Prime Minister's Office - to classify documents when they are created, according to themes such as "health", "law", or "welfare". The system then attaches topic, theme and relationship metadata to the document, enabling it to be categorised as part of a larger grid of files - all connected semantically. For the first time, users will be able to intelligently search for specific documents according to semantic concepts, or browse through chains of related documents across the various Governmental Ministries and departments.

"We have implemented NetworkedPlanet's solution in order to enhance the publishing system we chose to use," commented Petter Thorsrud, Senior Advisor at the Norwegian Government Administration Services. "Most content management systems are lacking the metadata capabilities we need for a large system like ours, and using a topic maps tool seemed a good solution. TMCore allows us to create navigation and associations across the system, and so far has proved to be capable of handling the amount of files we have.

"On a daily basis, the public needs to access a huge amount of content as quickly as possible," Petter Thorsrud continued. "By adding metadata properties to all content elements, documents become intricately connected according to themes and relationships, enabling content to be accessed rapidly - whether for editing or viewing purposes. The system will provide us with a navigation solution for the existing 300,000 web pages, as well as a long-term information infrastructure for the Norwegian Government as more and more people use the website to access information."

"Implementing a solution into an organisation as large as the Norwegian Government is a great opportunity to demonstrate the power of topic maps technology," added Graham Moore, Director and Founder of NetworkedPlanet. "Navigation can become a huge problem for bigger organisations, especially where data and documents are stored on disparate systems. By adding metadata properties to each file, the process of recognising and locating documents becomes significantly easier. In an organisation with over 300,000 web pages, the result is a detailed 'map' of information - containing themes, relationships, keywords, as well as over half a million topics themselves."

TMCore is NetworkedPlanet's server platform for developing enterprise knowledge and information management applications. The TMCore server stores and manages 'topic maps' of an organisation's content repositories. Topics hold information about themselves, links to related documents and links to other topics, creating a map of knowledge. This map can be browsed or searched by end-users to find information resources via key concepts. The result is a detailed index of the organisation's information resources across a number of systems via a single unified information portal.

<sub>About NetworkedPlanet
NetworkedPlanet was formed in 2004 to develop topic map processing tools and applications specifically for the Microsoft .NET framework. The company’s first product, TMCore05, was released in January 2005. NetworkedPlanet provides a suite of tools and products to organise and structure the access to information with the aim of making if easier for end-users to locate relevant information. It provides a range of tools scaling up from work-group information management to full-scale commercial websites and enterprise content management systems. For more information, visit: www.networkedplanet.com

Kal Ahmed
Founder
NetworkedPlanet Limited
Tel: 01865 811131
kal.ahmed@networkedplanet.com</sub>

_{Louise Sambells
The PressOffice,
PR for NetworkedPlanet
Tel: 01780 721433
lsambells.pressoffice@targetwire.com}

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