The AXYZnews information monitoring system has completed its first phase of development and is preparing for launch. Originally, the AXYZnews program is the result of research in the field of content syndication and information retrieval, initiated in 2011 with the projects for the global news search engine SYNC2news and the global scientific information search engine in medicine SYNC2med. Difficulties in obtaining adequate resources and equipment to sustain experiments over prolonged periods led to the suspension of development efforts aimed at creating an online information portal.

In 2014, the project was reactivated under the name AXYZnews to respond to Law 21/2014, of November 4, amending the Intellectual Property Law. The law resulted in the shutdown of the news portal Google News Spain. Despite the absence of any profit motive, the law penalizes any reproduction, however minimal, of news provided free of charge by media outlets through their public and open syndication channels, which are perfectly indexed by any web search engine.

AXYZnews is an informational surveillance system very similar to Google News in many respects, designed to function as a standalone desktop web application, independent of any other platform. Therefore, it is not an online news portal but rather a personal tool for each user, who may freely download and use it on their own computer under their own responsibility. Moreover, it also serves a research purpose, as there is a need for tools that enable the study and understanding of a country’s informational output, the characterization of published content, the generation of information alerts, filtering of information, analysis of media outlets, classification of editorial lines and opinion trends, development of automated classification systems, techniques for semantic relationship among news items, and design of weighting methods based on user profiles, among other potential advancements.

However, AXYZnews is not intended solely to provide current information on politics, economy, society, events, and facts published in the print, radio, and television media of a specific country. For this reason, the following development roadmap for AXYZnews is presented for the near future, illustrating the versions that will be prepared in the coming months.

roadmap-axyznews

Figure 1. AXYZnews development roadmap


AXYZnews will have two differentiated versions: «AXYZ u» (user), designed for the information user and consumer, and the «AXYZ r» (researcher) version, intended for researchers for scientific purposes. The user version of AXYZnews may be freely downloaded, while the research version will require completing a form to register the researchers and institutions that intend to use it. Based on this foundation, the program’s information sources may vary depending on the user’s selection among different options:

  • Media outlets. The user or researcher may select a country and work with its pre-classified print, radio, and television media. Currently, resources for Spain, Portugal, and Brazil are prepared. Resources for Mexico, Italy, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States are pending review. Additional countries will be incorporated as the program develops and in accordance with a network of collaborators in interested countries.
  • Documentation Sciences. It will compile the main information sources in the field of Library and Information Science worldwide, providing a comprehensive informational reference. This includes specialized scientific journals, major libraries, blogs, websites of prominent professionals and researchers, professional organizations and associations, and possibly specialized companies in the sector.
  • Medicine and Health Sciences. The prior experience from the SYNC2med project provided a catalog of more than 14,000 classified sources and syndication channels according to the MESH taxonomy. The plan includes updating the resources and developing specialized editions, for example: Addiction, Immunology, Anatomy, Anesthesiology, Biochemistry, Bioinformatics, Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Biomechanics, Biotechnology…
  • Social Sciences and Humanities. As in other editions, all available resources in the fields of Education, Geography, History, Anthropology, Law, Philosophy, Psychology, etc., will be tracked, generating collections of information sources for use in AXYZ.
  • Engineering. An edition oriented toward research, which will recover all information sources from journals specialized in each engineering discipline, generating specific collections for civil and infrastructure engineering, chemical, electronic, mechanical, industrial, mining, metallurgical, materials, etc.
  • Pure and Experimental Sciences. Specialties planned include Astronomy, General Biology, Botany, Chemistry, Geology, Mathematics, Physics, etc.