LexisNexis^™ Provides Its Leading Taxonomy, Concept Identification Techniques for Innovative Online Content Organizing Tool
Off-the-shelf Indexing Product Enables Businesses to Integrate Internal, External Information Under One Customizable, Easily Searchable Infrastructure

BETHESDA, MD, July 01, 2002 - LexisNexis™, the global leader in legal, news and business information services, today launches a content organizer capability, jointly developed with Verity Inc., that enables a business organization to leverage its information assets for better decision-making by classifying and integrating a business' enterprise information in a single, easy-to-navigate tool.

The LexisNexis Content Organizer couples the superior and highly refined LexisNexis taxonomies and concept definitions with Verity^®'s K2 Enterprise's powerful intelligent classification capability to provide customers with an easy-to-use and highly accurate solution.

"The LexisNexis Content Organizer enables corporations to improve productivity and augment business acumen by ensuring that necessary information is accurately classified and easily accessible," said Paul Kesaris, senior vice president of the Enterprise Solutions group for the Corporate and Federal Markets Unit of LexisNexis. "Addressing the challenge of the information glut facing today's corporate executives, this product allows the user to pinpoint quickly the relevant information needed to support critical business decisions."

With flexible customization capabilities, the LexisNexis information delivery model accommodates new products such as the LexisNexis Content Organizer to focus on targeted solutions that can be integrated into customer business processes and systems. In addition to offering customized delivery of targeted content from its comprehensive collections of news and business information, LexisNexis is further refining its information presentation and delivery mechanisms so they become as user-centric as possible.

"Our future includes more than simply adding new content sources to the thousands already on board with LexisNexis," Kesaris said. "We are committed to understanding how today's chief executive officer, chief financial officer, information professional and line manager spend their days, what their information needs are, and how we can better anticipate those needs so the right information is readily available at the right time."

Through a strategic alliance, announced in 2001, LexisNexis and Verity now offer their customers this powerful software infrastructure to enhance significantly their existing knowledge management capabilities.

The LexisNexis Content Organizer's highlights include the following:

• Accurate content organization.  With decades of experience organizing complex business and legal information, LexisNexis has developed taxonomy and concept definitions that accurately organize an enterprise’s content. The directory structure of categories and subcategories as well as the thousands of concepts that define them have been developed and perfected by recognized taxonomy and classification leaders over the last quarter-century. 
  
  
• Intuitive navigation. LexisNexis' taxonomy lets users intuitively navigate enterprise content. Through the use of the Verity K2E capabilities, customers can extend the taxonomy structures as needed so that information professionals can select preferred paths for narrowing a search, or conduct a search only within a specified content area. Such options help ensure that the search yields only directly relevant and applicable results, rather than a broad selection of items to be manually screened and sorted.
  
  
• Customizable concept definitions. LexisNexis concept definitions – which cover standard topics of major industries, business actions, financial news, legal and regulatory activities, scientific discovery, health and disease, sports, weather, society and cultural issues – can be customized/extended to an enterprise's specific needs (e.g., organized by business-specific concepts).
  

About LexisNexis

LexisNexis™ is the global leader in comprehensive and authoritative legal, news and business information and tailored applications. Its online services combine searchable access to over three billion documents from thousands of sources.  A member of Reed Elsevier plc [NYSE:  ENL; NYSE:  RUK], LexisNexis is headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, USA, and does business in 100 countries with 12,000 employees worldwide.

The company offers an extensive range of online and print products and customized tools that address job-specific and organization-wide information needs, driving productivity and confident decision-making. In addition to LexisNexis™ at www.nexis.com and www.lexis.com for corporate, government, legal and association professionals, the company's diverse portfolio of products includes PR Solutions for public relations practitioners; Risk Solutions including extensive public records capabilities and featuring the National Fraud Center for law enforcement and investigative professionals; LexisNexis Universe products for academic institutions; and The Directory of Corporate Affiliations and the Advertising Redbooks. LexisNexis recently was named one of KM World magazine's "Top 100 Companies in Knowledge Management."

About Verity

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Cal., Verity (NASDAQ: VRTY) is a leading provider of business portal infrastructure software.  Verity software gives businesses a multitude of ways to improve access to vital information and perform a range of e-business operations, while enhancing the end-user experience. Verity-powered business portals, which include corporate portals used for sharing information within an enterprise; e-commerce portals for online selling; and market exchange portals for B2B activities, all provide personalized information to employees, partners, customers and suppliers.

Verity products are used by approximately 80 percent of the Fortune 50 and by more than 1,500 corporations in various markets.