I have been reading a very interesting and comprehensive report, Semantic Software Technologies: Landscape of High Value Applications for the Enterprise by Lynda Moulton of the Gilbane group. This is a topic I am both curious about and, at times, find puzzling so I was eager to see what Lynda wrote as I have great respect for her work. I am not the only one as I often see conference sessions with such labels as “Is semantic technology real?”
Lynda wrote that she deliberately chose title of this study to refer to semantic software technologies not simply semantic search technologies. She added that the end point of any semantic software is to improve finding and interpreting content, a search activity. However, Lynda wanted to look at the total range of surrounding software tools and not simply search as narrowly defined.
The semantic tools surrounding search are often not familiar to IT and business managers so they are underutilized when opportunities for major enterprise semantic search improvements could be made. In her study, offerings that are complementary to search are examined and highlighted for their business benefits.
Lynda explained that the vision of semantic search is the availability of software algorithms that would improve retrieval for the average person by interpreting their native inquiry and returning semantically relevant results. This is as clear a definition as I have seen. In 2001 Tim Berners-Lee published an article in Scientific American proposing a semantic web evolving out of the expanding worldwide web and this concept has been seen as a holy grail for the Web ever since.
The concept has followed the trend of other tools of moving from the Web to the enterprise. However, Lynda notes that in the enterprise, expectations for relevant search results are much higher than on the internet, where much content is already optimized for e-commerce. Each business unit in an organization has its own specialized requirements for finding information that may be in many different formats and operating under different taxonomies or none at all.
This is where other types of semantic processing beyond search can give organizations a “competitive edge by getting workers to answers more quickly, with more conceptual relevance, and even with pinpoint accuracy. The idea is to get only the right information (only relevant) and all the right information (everything that is relevant).” Well stated.
Her study exposes the scope and depth of software technologies that comprise the semantic tool landscape to address these issues. Topics include: text mining and text analytics, concept and entity extraction, concept analysis, natural language processing, content data normalizing, sentiment analysis, and auto-categorization. Lynda notes that these categories of technologies are very interdependent and most semantic software application offerings use several of these tools.
This is a comprehensive work that runs over 80 pages. It covers an important area that is one of the next frontiers for enterprise IT. In some ways the semantic web has run parallel to Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0. I have even heard it described as enterprise 3.0 or Web 3.0. This is ironic since it emerged beyond the 2.0s. However, it has taken longer to become concrete. This report helps with that effort. It is available for a free download at the Gilbane site.
Thanks for your thoughts! Very insightful.
Posted by: Steve | December 17, 2010 at 12:58 PM