Xipolis.net

Xipolis.net was an internet portal on which mainly German-language reference works were offered. Most recently Brockhaus Duden Neue Medien GmbH , a subsidiary of the Bibliographisches Institut & F. A. Brockhaus (BIFAB) operated the site. As part of the sale of F. A. Brockhaus to the Bertelsmann subsidiary Wissen Media Verlag , the offer was discontinued at the end of July 2009.

offer

In June 2005 almost 50 specialist lexicons and dictionaries were offered, a large part of them from the BIFAB's holdings. Compared to the original announcements - with one exception - there were no longer any newspaper or magazine archives. The offers Die Zeit , Handelsblatt and Tagesspiegel have been removed. In autumn 2004 the texts of the 20th edition of the Brockhaus Encyclopedia were replaced by the less extensive Brockhaus texts in 15 volumes .

Since 2001, the offer has comprised a total of around one million articles with sizes between a few and 1000 words.

Early announcements and press reports referred to plans to combine the content with other commercial offers on the Internet. In an Intel brochure, xipolis refers to a link in the music dictionary with music providers such as Edel Music , MTV and Amazon . The years 2001 to 2003 were named as the time frame. There was no implementation.

In the early days, part of the content was displayed free of charge, including Brockhaus in a volume or the Roche Lexicon Medicine ; thereafter, the content, with the exception of short reference articles, was subject to a charge.

Products

plant	Work name	05-00	10-00	12-00	03-01	06-01	10-01	12-01	02-02
Br1	Br1: Brockhaus in one volume	OR	MR	MR	MR	MR
DB5	DB5: DUDEN Volume 5 - The foreign dictionary	OR	X	X	X	X
BrG	BrG: The health brokerage house	MR	MR	MR	MR	MR
RLM	RLM: Roche Lexicon Medicine	MR	MR	MR	MR	MR
BrE	BrE: Brockhaus. The Encyclopedia (20th Edition)	30th	30th	30th	30th	30th
DWS	DWS: Duden. The large dictionary of the German language	20th	20th	20th	20th	20th
FWA	FWA: The Fischer World Almanac	30th	30th	30th	30th	30th
KNL	KNL: Kindlers New Literature Lexicon	50	50	50	50	50
RML	RML: Rock Music Lexicon	20th	30th	30th	30th	30th
ThL	ThL: Theater Lexicon	20th	20th	20th	20th	20th
SWZ	SWZ: Spectrum of Science (Journal Archive)	50	50	50	X	X
SWT	SWT: Spectrum of Science (Online Ticker Archive)	30th	30th	30th	X	X
ZEI	ZEI: The time	50	50	50	50	X
WMK	WMK: How does it work? Man and his illnesses	X	MR	MR	MR	MR
nLM	nLM: The new lexicon of music	X	26th	26th	26th	26th
WTh	WTh: How does it work? Technology today	X	X	X	MR	MR
WWh	WWh: How does it work? Economy today	X	X	X	MR	MR
FWL	FWL: The Fischer Business Lexicon	X	X	X	MR	MR
MTC	MTC: The M + T Computer Lexicon	X	X	X	MR	MR
FDL	FDL: Film Service Lexicon	X	X	X	15th	15th
LdB	LdB: Lexicon of Biology	X	X	X	30th	30th

Legend:

• OR: Can be viewed free of charge without registration
• MR: Can be viewed free of charge with registration
• X: Not visible at this time
• Number: corresponding number xipoints

history

The first announcements for the xipolis.net project came from the Frankfurt Book Fair 1999 by Florian Langenscheidt, a member of the BIFAB board at the time . The investment of high seven-digit (D-Mark) amounts was promised. The text of the Brockhaus was designated as the centerpiece.

The company Megalex Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH (corporate purpose: "Management of own assets as well as assuming the position of a personally liable partner in trading companies") and Xipolis.net GmbH & Co. KG (corporate purpose: "the operation of an internet-based online Service that is supposed to combine various lexical and encyclopedic contents, namely the provision of paid retrieval and research services to third parties. ").

Initially, both BIFAB and the Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH publishing group each had a 50% stake in both companies . Michael Munz was appointed managing director of Megalex Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH.

In May 2001 Megalex took over the insolvent Tanto AG (corporate purpose: production, provision, distribution, marketing and presentation of information offers within the framework of existing online services and / or within the framework of offering its own services (content provider) as a business-to-business Trading platform for online content as well as acquisition and administration (including taking over the management) of investments in other companies). Tanto (derived from the founder name Tanja Wall Rabenstein and Thomas Rosenstiel) was in December 1999 from the shelf company 99167 asset management corporation CM founded. On 11 June 2001, opened the Munich Local Court the insolvency proceedings over the assets of the Company (Ref .: 1503 IN 884/01).

In May 2002 Megalex was renamed "Tanto Xipolis GmbH". Xipolis GmbH & Co. KG was brought into Tanto Xipolis GmbH by the two shareholders. The purpose of the company was reformulated: "Marketing of media content and associated applications by various rights holders, in particular for the business-to-business and business-to-consumer areas (content syndication business)".

At the end of November 2002, BIFAB announced that the company's subsidiary Brockhaus Duden Neue Medien would take over the operation of the site. The technical support should remain with Tanto Xipolis.

In January 2004 the company was renamed again to Tanto Portal Solutions .

In May 2005, Tanto Portal Solutions was dissolved. The liquidation is carried out by the managing director of Brockhaus Duden Neue Medien and the lawyer Michael Stephan.

Financial

Xipolis.net has been in deficit since its launch. According to the magazine Werben & Sell , the two shareholders invested ten million marks (5.1 million euros) in the project in the first 18 months. According to Michael Munz, sales in August 2001 in the B2C segment were in the five-digit DM range.

The managing director of Brockhaus Duden Neue Medien GmbH told the magazine Der Kontakter in June 2004 that they only wanted to continue operating xipolis if they had the prospect of an economic operation.

The publisher KG Saur, member of the supervisory board of BIFAB, declared in February 2004:

The responsible management board comes to every supervisory board meeting and says: “Unfortunately, Mr. Saur was right again: the losses are much higher, the sales are much lower, the financial needs are greater; our only joy is that half of this loss has to be taken over by Holtzbrinck - and that we only bear half, but every year 2-3 million euros ” .

In the past, the Xipolis page contained more advertising, later only on individual pages, in banner formats typical of the network. Part of the advertising related to offers from content providers.

Technical

The database used Lucene for search queries , the user interface used PHP to output the data.

In the beginning, technical services were provided by Media Professionals, who also hosted the site until the beginning of 2003. According to Intel, the database consisted of Oracle 8 servers running on the Solaris operating system . The search engine for the Mr. Check offer was the FindLink software from Connex Software GmbH.

reception

Both the announcement and the launch of xipolis.net received attention in the German-language press.

On April 1, 2000, Achim Bahnen noticed some missing functions in the FAZ , announcements about upcoming works and the missing full-text search. The start of the project in the Berlin taz on April 6, 2000 was received negatively : "It has been online since last week, promises a lot and keeps little". On April 7, 2000 , the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote a review of the offer under the title “Xipolis.njet!” . The editor Daniel Weber summed up the conclusion "Who pays for something like this is your own fault."

In the summer of 2000, Alexander Pawlak reported in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit , which belongs to the Holtzbrinck publishing group, on the problems of the competing portals “xipolis.net and Wissen.de : At Xipolis, on the other hand, a lot of time and patience is required to navigate through Java error messages and the numerous Click through levels. "

Web links

• Frankfurt Book Fair: Brockhaus on the Internet . Heise.de, October 16, 1999
• Brockhaus establishes a knowledge portal in the World Wide Web . AP , October 18, 1999
• Commercial register entries for the companies: Xipolis.net GmbH & Co. KG, Megalex Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, Bibliographisches Institut & FA Brockhaus AG, Tanto Portal Solutions GmbH
• Intel - Successtory - Pioneering Infotainment Portal Sets the Pace for Online Media. May 2000
• xipolis.net: Pioneering Knowledge Portal built on Open Standards based ASP Platform . Intel Solution Brief, October 2000
• Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? In: Advertise & Sell , August 24, 2001
• The changing encyclopedia . In: Cologne working papers on library and information science . Volume 32, April 2002
• The knowledge portal is to be activated - a relaunch is due in autumn . The contact, June 14, 2004
• Uptime information from Netcraft to the host www.xipolis.net
• Xipolis.net ( Memento of March 14, 2009 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ nzz.ch ( Memento of the original from April 18, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Xipolis new . In: Die Zeit , No. 28/2000