Newspaper Archives on the Semantic Web

The introduction of information technologies in the news industry has marked a new evolutionary cycle in the journalistic activity. The creation of new infrastructures, protocols and exchange standards for the automatic or on-demand distribution and/or sale of information packages through dif-ferent channels and transmission formats has deeply transformed the way in which news industry players communicate with each other. One inter-esting consequence of this technological transformation has been the emergence, in very few years, of a whole new market of online services for archive news redistribution, syndication, aggregation, and brokering. Newspaper archives are a highly valuable information asset for the widest range of information consumer profiles: students, researchers, historians, business professionals, the general public, and not the least, news writers themselves. Providing technology for news archive construction, manage-ment, access, publication, and billing, is an important business nowadays. The information collected from everyday news is huge in volume, very loosely organized, and grows without a global a-priori structure. This ever-growing corpus of archived news results from the coordinated but to much extent autonomous work of a team of reporters, whose primary goal is not to build an archive, but to serve the best possible information product for