Putting Germany 0nline

Electronic publishing is flourishing in Europe’s largest PC market.

In the nearly two years since it was spun off from the German concern TA Triumph Adler (itself part of the Olivetti empire), Electronic Publishing Partners (formerly T A Electronic Publishing) has successfully made the transition from being a small R&O cog within a very large industrial wheel to a small start, up with a healthy entreupreneural spirit. According to EPP’s co,founder and managing director Klemens Waldhör, the comp,any is now financially self, sufficient , supporting itself from the income generated by its products and services. EPP enjoys several strong allies in the German publishing world, namely Rossipaul and Schmidt-Römhild, Germany’s oldest publishing and printing house, both of which are now shareholders in the company.
    The company has tempered its original ambitions of launching a mass-market oriented line of dictionary and terminology software under its own name. Instead, it has formed an alliance with Munich publisher Rossipaul, whereby the latter will market, under the name GlobeDisk, a line of home and office electronic reference works based on materials developed by EPP. In this increasingly competitive market, GlobeDisk has several things going for it.
For one, the price is right, less than DM100 for the entry level package, positioning it clearly under the impulse purchase price point in Germany’s booming personal computer market. For another, EPP and Rossipaul are offering a diverse array of optional bilingual lexicons and specialist terminology lists, distributed both on CD-ROM and on floppy disk. For the do-it-yourself’ers, EPP also offers the GlobeDisk Editor for compiling and managing user dictionaries. The variety of options that EPP and Rossipaul offer and the ability of the software to handle multiple reference works simultaneously makes GlobeDisk appealing to a broad array of users.

At the other end of the spectrum, EPP has also introduced a dictionary and terminology database development system under its own name called DictionaryWorkbench, which it previewed at the fall 1994 Frankfurt B&�uml;chmesse. Two versions are now available: a low-end version for developing termbases (DM1500-2000), which EPP will be selling via third parties, and a high-end version for dictionary publishers (DM9800) which it is marketing itself.
The latter offers database systems for managing projects with multiple authors and editors, annota’ tion and verification facilities for publishers, and specialized sorting and entry expansion functions.
The system generates SGML output which can be sent directly to a photosetter. Waldhör says EPP alread y has two customers for the system, German publisher Brandstädter Verlag (Wiesbaden) and Swiss publisher Ott (Thun), the latter of which also supplied EPP with various lexicons for GlobeDisk.
Not surprisingly, DictionaryWorkbench evolved from the work the group did within the ESPRIT MultiLex project, which undertook the specification of a generic framework for developing multilingual lexicons and terminology databases.
    In addition to developing its own consumer and specialist products, EPP also contracts its services to others. Last year, it created electronic versions of Gewußt-Wo (the German Yellow Pages) for the cities of Lubeck and Berlin at the behest of Schmidt,Römhild. The electronic Gewußt-Wo, which are distributed on CD-ROM, include both sound and video, turning the search for a plumber or a new muffler into a multi,sensory experience. In many cities of the world, the Yellow Pages are distributed for free, but the electronic versions for these two cities cost DM48 for the Lubeck edition and DM89 for the Berlin one. According to Wald, hör, there is great interest in these kinds of electronic publications, and the company has five more editions in the pipeline for various cities. According to Waldhör, electronic publishing services currently generate the bulk of EPP’s revenues. Given the tremendous interest in CD-ROM publishing and online information services, this is a market which can only expand.

In its life as an R&D group, EPP built up consider, able expertise in computational linguistics, but Waldhör acknowledges that it has not been easy to exploit this knowledge in commercial products. EPP has implemented morphological reduction in its look,up routines and uses “linguistically,sophistic, ated” fuzzy matching for information retrieval purposes but that is about the extent of it, although Waldhör says an upcoming version of Dictionary’ Workbench will use morphological generation to produce full declensions of entries. “For a product, the interface remains the most important thing,” declares Waldhör. “Otherwise, even the best com’ putationallinguistics is worth nothing.” Practically speaking, “a good user interface can be worth more than lots of fancy NLP techniques,” says WWaldhör.

Electronic Publishing Partners, F¨hrter Straße 212, D,90429 N¨rnberg 80, Germany; Tel: +49 911 32 42 910, Fax: +499113242919