Content Acquisition Technologies

Businesses across the globe revolve around content. It includes just about everything from financial details in an accounting system, to product information in a Web catalog, to streaming audio and video for presentations.

Where exactly content is found?

Content is found on public Internet, client extranet, corporate intranet, industry marketplaces and ecommerce; In published materials : annual reports, press releases, articles, product sheets; In business systems: client histories and case studies, product specifications, training manuals and video; In advertising agencies: collateral, TV spots, interviews, promotions; In the hands of suppliers: delivery schedules, trade volumes, terms and conditions.

The scale of content is extremely variable. It may be brief pieces of product information and graphics placed on a Web catalog-many small items that change frequently; or, content may be entire manuals of detailed schema accessible in print and on CD-ROM-a small number of very large, complex documents that are authored once and rarely updated.

Managing and distributing diversified content cannot be done with one set of tools and techniques. The content within large corporations is often spread wide within the structure (people, departments, SBUs) and geography of the company to be properly exploited.

The process of serving content to users involves content Aggregation/Acquisition/Collection. Content Acquisition involves collecting content from multiple sources could be internal or external resources.
Internal resources could be file systems or intranet and external systems could be web sites or file systems or mail servers or portals or business data repositories or feeds or any other mechanism used by content partners.

Each of these systems is designed differently and pulling out desired content from them becomes a challenging task. More than managing multiple content partners and content formats, the key consideration is to ensure reliability which is determined by ability to handle varying frequency of content editions/updations, managing push/pull situations between the partners, scheduling for automated operations etc.

Some questions to ask when evaluating Content Aggregation solutions:

What types of content is included in the service (e.g., articles, white papers, press releases, rich media)?
How is the content filtered (e.g., by keyword, by category)?

What’s the pricing model (e.g., setup fee, monthly/annual license, tiered models based on volume/category type)?

How well can the content be integrated into my site design?

It means the possibility of creating content once and publishing it in whole or in part in different platforms simultaneously. With ever expanding business scenarios, organization’s growing organically & inorganically, integration and collection of data from various sources also becomes a challenge.

Our Capability

Mobius extracts information from disparate data sources like file systems/websites/emails/portals/databases in the form of text, images, graphics, video, audio, documents, and records etc. and transforms the collected information into structured XML format which can be delivered to a relational database.

Mobius has the ability to access content deep inside the specific target data sources involving submitting information like user credentials, search criteria, defining navigation depths etc. Aggregation can be scheduled and automated based on the change frequency of the content ensuring zero downtime and failover with load-balancing.

Classification and storage of unstructured data from disparate sources into user defined structured XML format is one of the key area of specialization for Mobius.

As content demands increase while editorial staffs shrink, digital media companies are continually on the lookout for new sources of content. While aggregating third-party information has helped fill the content coffers, many publishers are looking to move beyond simple RSS feeds, which deliver headlines but little else in terms of the quality and relevance of the information being served.