WSJ Pro Bankruptcy Knowledge Panel Launch

Dow Jones has recently launched the WSJ Pro Bankruptcy Knowledge Panel, the first generally available product feature powered by the Dow Jones Knowledge Graph, that offers subscribers contextually relevant information about Chapter 11 bankruptcy cases covered by the WSJ Pro newsroom.

A s Covid-19 ripples through the economy — putting many industries under pressure and increasing the number of high-profile bankruptcies — the Knowledge Panel offers restructuring professionals answers to common questions about cases (e.g. ‘what law firm is representing the debtor?’ or ‘who are the top unsecured creditors?‘) while also providing access to a curated selection of key court filings. You can see a live example of the Knowledge Panel in this article about PG&E and this article about Neiman Marcus under the section labelled “On the Docket.”

The development of this feature was a cross-functional effort that included team members from the Knowledge Graph team, WSJ Engineering, DataSET, Data Strategy and the WSJ Pro newsroom and commercial team. The team worked with a group of bankruptcy professionals in a design thinking customer co-creation process. This process involved understanding the users’ workflows and knowledge needs, prototyping concepts and validating those ideas with the customers. With a validated prototype, the knowledge graph ontology for bankruptcies was modeled and a data acquisition pipeline was developed.

The information about these bankruptcies is now stored in the Knowledge Graph, and, thanks to the integration work done by the WSJ Engineering Front-end and Methode teams with the Knowledge Graph APIs, is now being surfaced in these articles. Having this data modeled and structured in this way makes it easier to perform complex queries on the data, laying the groundwork for potentially developing more sophisticated products in the future (e.g. natural language search capabilities — “Who is the judge on the Philadelphia Energy Solutions case?” — or conversational / chatbot interfaces.)

“Bankruptcy professionals struggle to get to critical information quickly,” said Nick Elliot, Head of Professional Products Innovation and Strategy, The Wall Street Journal. “The new data features will surface some of that information within stories, saving time and presenting opportunities for these customers as they tackle what could be a major wave of Chapter 11 filings.”

While the Knowledge Panel in its current form focuses on Chapter 11 bankruptcy events, the design, data acquisition (both human- and technology-driven) and technology frameworks developed for this use-case are domain-agnostic. This framework can be easily repurposed to focus on other domains such as earnings announcements, IPOs, mergers or any other set of entities and relationships that our customers need to understand while interacting with our news content.

This new data and news experience was made through cross-team collaboration from Dow Jones’s Knowledge Graph team, DataSET, WSJ Pro, WSJ Pro Newsroom, WSJ Pro Tech, Pubedit and Data Strategy teams.

— —

Knowledge Graph: Benjamin Gil, Toni Cebrian, Felipe Quirce, Jordi Olivares, Hector Perez, Mari Avikainen, Stefania Calabrese, Dylan Roy

DataSET: Jonathan Duxbury, Helen Hewitt

WSJ Pro: Will Wilkinson, Nick Elliott, Henry Williams (now Tech), Tom Corrigan, Zachary Cole, Lorri Wagner, Kelli Parker

WSJ Pro Newsroom: Kimberly Johnson, Prabha Natarajan, Patrick Fitzgerald

WSJ Pro Tech: Thowfeeq Mustafa, Ernesto Rodriguez, Ratheesh Nair

Pubedit: Andrey Kan, Eleonora Kovalyova

Data Strategy: Algy Sanders, Matthew Clary