Roularta Media Group is part of the European top of the Google Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund

Thanks to its Metahaven project, Roularta Media Group is part of the European top of the Google Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund. That Initiative rewards European projects which stimulate digital innovation in the news industry.

Google announced the first selected projects on 24 February 2016. From a total of 1,200 projects, coming from European publishers and other players of the digital news industry, Google chose 128 media projects (i.e. 10.66%) from 23 European countries. The awarded projects can count on a total funding of 27 million euro for the execution of all projects. The Google Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund is spread over three years (2 project calls per year) and takes up a total budget of 150 million euro, in other words 50 million euro per year.

Through the Metahaven project, Roularta Media Group will add enrichments/metadata to all media content and offer it to its readers in a pertinent and personalized manner by way of new digital services. Furthermore, thanks to the Metahaven project, Roularta Media Group can optimize the news creating process by fully supporting the journalists when creating their content.

Roularta Media Group collaborates with Zeticon (a Flemish SME specialized in text mining solutions) and the University of Leuven (in particular its Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments, which put their expertise in matters of text, image and video at the disposal of Roularta Media Group). Zeticon and the University of Leuven provide the underlying technological innovation, which Roularta Media Group will implement in its editorial systems

CEO Bruno Van Den Bossche of Zeticon – ‘The Metahaven project is an enormous boost to Zeticon’s R&D department. It helps us to preserve and even expand our technological lead in data mining products, whereas it offers new possibilities to our clients – such as Roularta Media Group –, so that they offer their readers high quality news. That is progress for not only all project partners but the readers as well!’ –

Professor Tinne Tuytelaars and Professor Marie-Francine Moens of the University of Leuven – ‘Thanks to the Metahaven project, we hope to develop intelligent machines which will analyse news texts and images in order to classify them automatically.’–

More information? https://www.digitalnewsinitiative.com/