The 2009 InterSystems Worldwide Innovator Award winners were announced in Phoenix, Arizona on Monday, March 23 during the opening session of the InterSystems developers' conference - DEVCON.

Knowledge picked up the title, a 10,000-dollar prize and valuable upcoming publicity in one of the USA's leading technology magazines, Computerworld, second place was Lead Horse Technologies (USA) and third place went to CommuniCare Tecnologia em Informática, Ltd (Brazil).

Knowledge, which has been in development for a little over a year and is live with the Midland News Association's Chronicles series of free weekly newspapers in the West Midlands since January, uses InterSystems' object orientated Caché database and Ensemble integration package to create a high-performance solution with the ability to automatically associate related content and create intelligent workflows for easier, faster, and richer content publication.

One of its key elements is a strong browser-based capability that promotes platform and a use anytime, anywhere geographical independence.

The award acknowledges the progress made in the development of a system, which has already achieved one notable first for PCS's rapid application development: The Chronicles were the first publications in the UK to go live using another key part of the Knowledge package, Quark XPress 8 and Quark XPress 8 Server.

Said Philip Walker, Managing Director of PCS: "We are absolutely delighted at this early recognition of the system."

"We have so far met all of our development targets and still have work to do to achieve everything we believe possible with Knowledge, but by partnering with world class companies like InterSystems we have signalled our intention to produce something that is much more than just a 'me too' publishing system."

"There is much more to come from Knowledge, including further integration with some a smart text mining technologies which will allow Knowledge to make intelligent workflow decisions, plus we are integrating with InDesign and InDesign Server."

Having completed rollout of the system on the West Midlands Chronicles, plans are underway to tackle the Shropshire Weekly Newspapers series in the next quarter, with the MNA's more complex evening titles, the Shropshire Star and Express & Star due on stream before the end of this year.