Encyclopedia of Earth

An online resource for up to date and broad content relating to earth science.

Challenge: Find a suitable social publishing platform that can support the Encyclopedia of Earths rapid growth and provide professional grade social networking capabilities within a scalable content management system.

Needs:

• Scale to millions of articles, reports, lectures, maps and other digital resources, all organized into extensive knowledge taxonomy.

• Support over 1,500 experts in over 60 countries co-creating content for the EoE.

• A platform with the flexibility to support on-line classrooms, cross publishing of information between web sites and user generated content.

• With limited IT resources, needed to provide a scalable and integrated platform that provides the tools required to manage the diverse and rich contents types the EoE presents.

Solution: The EoE launches on the Trunity.com platform easily managing the growing volume of expert driven environmental information.

• The Trunity platform allows content of all types, and is easily catalogued and navigated in a rich format.

• Content creation and knowledge management tools allow authors and editors with limited time/web expertise to build the EoE in a collaborative and distributed manner.

• Publishing roles, quality control and editorial workflow automated and managed in a distributed, hierarchical, manner.

• Live Cross Publishing and built-in social publishing/networking tools allowing EoE content to be re-used and re-mixed on other websites leveraging the platform.

• Fully-hosted SaaS (“Software as a Service”) model allowing the EoE to outsource all IT-related activities to Trunity, as well as leveraging new functionality and applications that are continually implemented and deployed by Trunity on a platform-wide basis.

Results: The Trunity platform helps the EoE fulfill its mission of being the pre-eminent source of information on the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society.

• EoE has been able to drastically expand the types of content as well as the depth of knowledge navigation.

• The EoE has now been able to effectively marry the high productivity of online “crowd sourcing” from experts with the editorial quality control typically associated with more traditional off-line encyclopedias.

• New ways of re-using EoE content for educational (such as the NSF sponsored CAMEL project) and social media applications are now possible and underway.

• The EoE has been able to eliminate the expense of its own IT staff, plus it is now able to implement new value-added applications enabled by the Trunity platform in order to expand EoE influence and generate operating revenue.

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