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Dialog Offering Most Extensive Content Options For Enterprise Portals

New Service Compatible With Nine Leading Portals Software and Applications Providers

CARY, N.C., USA (October 13, 2003) — Dialog, a Thomson (TSX: TOC; NYSE: TOC) business and a leading worldwide provider of online-based information services and integrated information solutions, today said it is now offering Dialog Portals, a next-generation information service that allows mission-critical business news, research and competitive intelligence to be integrated into enterprise portals.

The company said that its objective is to offer the deepest and richest set of content choices and information services for integration into industry-standard portal implementations. Content categories include news, market research, business and financial information, as well as science, technology and medical (STM) information and intellectual property records gathered from around the world.

Dialog Portals is compatible with systems offered by nine leading portals software and applications providers, the broadest array available from any information services company in the portals market.

The first release of Dialog Portals, now available for customer integration, enables "plug and play" access to a wide range of Dialog news, business and current awareness content. The next release of Dialog Portals, expected to be available next year, will add the STM and intellectual property content.

"With its broad content options and wide compatibility, Dialog Portals clearly is now the best-of-field choice for portal and intranet managers," said Roy M. Martin, Jr., Dialog president and CEO. "We're leveraging our decades of experience as a producer of online information services and an aggregator of information for research, and applying Web-based portal and intranet tools to offer a total solutions package for enterprises around the world."

Added Martin: "Enterprise portals are rapidly changing how information is utilized across organizations. Dialog Portals will empower portal and intranet managers to make their portal implementations more robust. That's a big step to harnessing the true competitive advantage of portals across an enterprise."

Enterprise portals deliver content and services across departments and organizations. They are online information-sharing networks created and maintained by corporations, government agencies, educational institutions and other organizations to provide employees and other constituents with a single entry point for collaboration, information dissemination and communication, application functionality and interactive capabilities.

Dialog Portals is a suite of Web-based information modules that provide access to databases of business news, analysis and research on industries, customers and competitors. The information is gathered by Dialog from tens of thousands of publishers and information providers worldwide, and may be customized for individual access by different offices, business units or departments across a subscribing enterprise.

Martin noted that the content options available through Dialog Portals would ultimately surpass those offered by other information providers due to Dialog's position as the leading information warehouse for research-based information. The Dialog online services today aggregate information from approximately 200,000 sources worldwide.

"Corporate librarians and other information professionals have long known that Dialog is the premier gatherer of news and current business reporting, as well as highly valued information in the science, technical, medical and intellectual property fields," Martin said. "Now we're offering that rich portfolio for integration into a wide array of portal software. No one else has the breadth and depth of our content choices."

Precision: Matching Internal Need with External Information

Martin said that Dialog Portals offers some of the most advanced customization features of any information service available to enterprise portal managers.

"We've created a service that is highly flexible. It allows enterprises to configure external information into their portal environments in whatever manner best serves their unique design and structure, and to do so department by department," he said. "At the same time, the advanced functionality gives users a tremendous range of options for easily finding the real-world information they need to make better decisions and be more successful in their jobs."

Examples of information categories currently and soon to be available through Dialog Portals include:

• Industry-specific, personalized current awareness and news alerting services that combine up-to-the-minute news, analysis and research with customized editorial relevance ranking. The selection of articles and their on-screen rankings are personally managed, based on client guidelines, by highly experienced Dialog editors who specialize in individual industry sectors.
  
  
• A broad array of intellectual property data, such as worldwide trademark, patent and domain name records.
  
  
• Articles from thousands of scholarly journals, providing research on a wide spectrum of scientific, technical and medical (STM) topics.
  
  
• Dialog® NewsRoom, the world's most comprehensive online database of current and recent news reports gathered from around the world. Dialog NewsRoom provides single-search access to nearly 8,000 sources of news reporting, including broadcast transcripts, newspapers, periodicals, newswires, trade and scholarly journals, and other sources, drawn from nearly 80 countries in English and 11 other languages.
  
  
• Company Information, which delivers financial and market data, M&A reporting and company-specific news and information. Users across an enterprise can create a personal company watch list to track the organizations relevant to their business and job function.
  
  
• The full texts of continuously updated versions of "must have" industry and trade publications.
  
  
• Premium news wires reporting on specific industries or regions.
  
  
• Weather, allowing users to integrate weather forecasts for multiple regions, such as for areas the business might have operations, into their portal environment.
  
  

Guaranteed Compatibility with More Providers

Dialog has developed Dialog Portals to be fully compatible with products offered by leading portals software and applications providers. The service is fully compatible with: ATG® Portal, BEA™ WebLogic Portal, Computer Associates® CleverPath Portal, IBM Websphere® Portal, Microsoft SharePoint™ Portal, Oracle® 9iAS Portal, Plumtree® Portal, Sun ONE Portal and Vignette® Application Portal (formerly Epicentric).

"Our mission with Dialog Portals is to get the right information in front of enterprise portal users when and how they need it," said Martin. "We're delighted to be working with so many of the portal industry's leading and most innovative providers."

For more information on Dialog Portals, please visit our Web site.

EDITORS: Please contact us to arrange a detailed briefing, including an online demonstration by Dialog Portals product managers.

- Ends -

About Dialog and The Thomson Corporation
Dialog, a pioneer in developing the technology behind electronic information retrieval, is the world leader in providing online-based information services to organizations seeking competitive advantages in such fields as business, science, engineering, finance and law.

Today, the online services provided by Dialog — offered through the Dialog®, Dialog Profound®, Dialog DataStar™, NewsEdge and Intelligence Data brands — give users the ability to precisely retrieve data from more than 1.4 billion unique records, accessible via the Internet or through delivery to enterprise intranets. Searchable content includes articles and reports from thousands of real-time news feeds, newspapers, broadcast transcripts and trade publications, plus research reports and analyst notes providing support for financial decision-making, as well as in-depth repositories of scientific and technical data, patents, trademarks and other intellectual property data. Information professionals and end-users at business, professional and government organizations in more than 100 countries prize Dialog services for their depth and breadth of content, precision searching and speed.

Based in Cary, N.C., USA, Dialog has operations in 31 other countries. Dialog (www.dialog.com) is a business of The Thomson Corporation (TSX: TOC; NYSE: TOC). With 2002 revenues of US$7.8 billion, Thomson (www.thomson.com) is a global leader in providing integrated information solutions to business and professional customers.

All designated trademarks used herein are the property of The Dialog Corporation or its subsidiaries. Registered marks are registered by The Dialog Corporation or its subsidiaries with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. All other marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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