news.de aims to publish current and high-quality reports on the latest
development of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reports should provide quick and
accurate access to information, such as the number of active cases, the
availability of intensive-care beds, or the progress in vaccination. news.de does
not only want to publish such reports for entire countries, as done by most news
providers, but also on a state and county level, since the current state of the
COVID-19 pandemic differs strongly from region to region. Given that Germany
has more than 400 counties, manually writing such reports would make it
impossible to publish them daily.
news.de uses the AX Semantics NLG Cloud and the DataCater platform to
automate the production of reports on the current situation of the COVID-19
pandemic for more than 400 different geographical regions. Reports are
generated at least twice per day and are based on data provided by the Robert
Koch Institute.
As data is the base of automated story writing with AX Semantics, there is
always the challenge to get enough, structured and accurate data. That's why
news.de uses DataCater to build the data pipelines, which extract data from
various APIs of the Robert Koch Institute, prepare the data for the text production,
and send the prepared data to the AX Semantics NLG Cloud. The AX Semantics
NLG Cloud uses the data to automatically produce optimized texts, which are
sent to the content management system of news.de.
By using AX Semantics for automating the production of COVID-19 reports, news.de was able to serve more than 25,000 article updates and reach a local audience of more than 800.000 new visitors per month.
Using DataCater for building and managing data pipelines allows the data
engineering team of news.de to save approximately 40 % of their time, otherwise
spent on manually crafting code, and increase the robustness of the data
preparation processes.
“Traditionally being a publisher focussed on national and international headlines, news.de was able to implement its first large-scale local news coverage thanks to the data-handling infrastructure provided by DataCater. Encouraged by the achievements, we will further expand upon the capabilities of DataCater, AX Semantics and its potential for content production at scale on a broader range of topics.”
André Tschachtli (CTO, news.de)
