Justis Publishing Limited (formerly Context Ltd) has a history of demonstrating that you do not have to own the
content in order to create high level values from accessing it. With
the law reports and Justis Publishing’s market-leading J-Link innovation this was
clearly the case, but it has seldom been so obvious as it is in its
Parlianet product. In the UK parliamentary information world, the
source material is not centralised, and some of it is in the hands of
publishers and organisations who might well have seen the opportunity of
creating an electronic fast-access index to this type of content as part
of their strategic vision. Proquest (Chadwyck-Healey) and The Stationery Office,
for example, have a long history of creating descriptive systems for grey
literature and government publishing output. The POLIS database and
the CELEX service of the European
Commission created internal database access for knowledgeable
users. The libraries of the Lords and Commons have formidable
digital collections. The legislation is available in Butterworth Lexis Direct and Westlaw UK. But all of this is
one dimensional information access: Justis Publishing’s Parlianet has provided the
user perspective.
If you need to follow the progress of a bill; track a topic through
debates in the UK, Scottish and Northern Irish legislatures; analyse the
participation of a parliamentarian or come by continuous update of the
‘where, in what context and by whom’ questions surrounding a topic, a
company or an individual, then Justis Publishing has devised the wizards and links
to support you. Furthermore, the graphic display tools included in
the interface enable you to present this analysis to the board or the
client in a highly professional way.
Most users in lobbying firms, PR agencies, corporate governance and
government relations units in FTSE500 companies will not be impressed by
the content – as long as it is comprehensive. The fact that
Parlianet holds the biographies of legislators; a complete parliamentary
question archive; Parliamentary Proceedings, with Hansard, Votes and
Proceedings, Minutes, Standing Committees and the text of Early Day
Motions, cross-referenced is beside the point. These users would
have a naïve expectation that in today’s internet service environment they
would find all of the legislation, the bill histories, the Official
Publications and the books and papers deposited by ministers in the
parliamentary libraries. It is just that access to these distributed
resources in distributed form is too much for this business marketplace,
for whom Parlianet provides an intelligent interface to organise and
interrogate this information nightmare. The challenge for Justis Publishing,
as always for technology-inspired innovators in information markets, is
not how you keep adding value to this, but how you reach the diverse
and unstructured marketplaces that will make effective use of it.
by David Worlock (drw@epsltd.com)
