by Demir Barlas

OneSource Information Services has debuted two products with the goal of making the company''s content warehouse more easily available as a service and ensuring the quality of data.
OneSource''s expertise is company-oriented content -- company and industry profiles, news, articles, executive biographies, performance metrics, contact information, and so forth. This content is available in already available in a self-service fashion, through OneSource''s Business Browser product, but the just-released AppLink 2.0 takes the service a step further, according to Yvonne Zekel, the company''s VP of marketing. "AppLink makes the content available directly in your applications: customer relationship management (CRM), portals, intranets."

AppLink also allows customers to combine their internal content with the content ported in from OneSource (which aggregates 2,500 information feeds from 30 providers into its content warehouse).

This is where OneSource''s second product debut -- content optimization services (COS) -- comes in. According to Bill Schumacher, OneSource''s SVP of content, "Some customers don''t have the content management (CM) and integration skills needed to pump [internal] information into the application." COS applies OneSource''s taxonomy to a customer''s internal data, preparing the way for integration via AppLink.

Schumacher emphasizes that COS isn''t a broad CM product; it is, instead, focused on just the kind of business information content OneSource delivers. "Traditional CM is broadly focused on textual information. We have a company orientation."