Smartlogic Semaphore is an...

Open Semantic Platform

It uniquely captures your topics into an ontology and surrounds them with language and context.

Semaphore makes your user's interaction with search and content systems exceptional by delivering the most:-

  • accurate search results
  • contextual navigation
  • precise, automated classification

An ontology-driven solution that improves findability

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Putting semantic models, such as taxonomies and ontologies, to work alongside your existing search engine means that the search navigation experience is one where the user is surrounded with both relevant and contextual information - we call this concept 'findability'.

We think of Semaphore as turning a search engine into a find engine - it helps users locate information as well as be guided around a subject.

More on what we do and why it works?

Better search-navigation experience – whatever the search engine

Semaphore enables search-navigation techniques like faceted navigation, disambiguation, and broader-than and narrower-than searches. Semaphore will also give you old fashioned I-didn’t-know-that moments when you get interesting results that you weren’t expecting. In other words, it gives you access to related information relevant to the subject you are searching.

You can combine Semaphore with your chosen search engine – we get great results with Google Search Appliance, Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007 and FAST ESP.

More on enhanced search-navigation experience?

Accurate and consistently applied metadata and classification

Semaphore is able to classify information automatically. Semaphore uses taxonomies and ontologies as the basis for determining what classification to assign to a piece of information. Semaphore delivers really accurate classification using automatically created classification rules derived from these models.

Because the classification method is model driven, so corporate classification standards can be accurately applied, automatically, and the results are auditable, repeatable and reliable.

More on Semaphore classification?

Semaphore gives you real control of your content

  • Deploy a taxonomy using our taxonomy-management tools.
  • Add metadata to content in a content management system; use metadata to drive federated, or enterprise search.
  • ‘Reveal’ content with clever search-navigation techniques (see our interactive demo).
  • Route or forward content (e.g. helping a fund-management firm make sure that only relevant content is routed to fund managers).

More on Semaphore components?

The aim of Smartlogic taxonomy software is to provide a platform that manages all forms of controlled vocabulary (aka semantic model). The taxonomy software manages taxonomies; ontologies (ontology); thesauri; folksonomies; filing schema and lists. The taxonomy software also drives information classification through a process known as taxonomy classification. The effect of taxonomy classification is to easily and more precisely apply metadata to content so information is more easily found by enterprise search engines. There is a navigation technique known as semantic search which requires that quality metadata be applied to the search index in order to perform properly. Therefore taxonomy software, driving taxonomy classification to yield quality metadata assists enterprise search engines to deliver a higher quality semantic search experience. This delivers the advantage of Findability.

Since 2002, our taxonomy software platform, Semaphore has helped organisations to better manage their metadata in content management systems, for example Sharepoint metadata. Taxonomy software has also enhanced the performance of enterprise search, and harnessed the true value in their corporate vocabularies using taxonomy classification.  The taxonomy software does this by using the terms in the taxonomy as the standard and looking for evidence in documents that matches this standard. The selected terms are those chosen by the taxonomy classification software as the most relevant match. This method is based on the way the human brain classifies information. Once the end user has a good understanding of how taxonomy classification driven from the taxonomy software can speed up their day, they turn attention to making enterprise search more targeted and enabling the system to produce a better semantic search experience using quality metadata, now available through taxonomy classification.

The Semaphore taxonomy software platform achieves these ends for Sharepoint via three tiers; through taxonomy software that provides taxonomy management; through taxonomy classification, that automatically categorises information; and by revealing the value and meaning of the information in the form of metadata. Sharepoint users get the benefit of quality Sharepoint metadata and better Sharepoint enterprise search.

Taking the goal of classification and navigation as the design criteria for our  taxonomy software platform, coupled with an enterprise’s need to categorise, manage and harness unstructured information, we created our taxonomy software platform to help an organisation to develop its own enterprise search navigation experience and ensure accurate content classification using taxonomy classification techniques to achieve this end. Implementing taxonomy software to deliver taxonomy classification (that ultimately powers semantic search results) increases efficiency and is a cost effective solution to the most common information problems that businesses face every day. Namely the time wasted by employees searching for vital information via enterprise search. Enterprise Search engines without the enhancement of taxonomy software are ill equipped to provide information in context nor able to offer precise semantic search results. Our taxonomy software solves this problem.

The aim of the taxonomy organising hierarchy and taxonomy  classification is to make as user friendly an enterprise search platform to work with, as possible, so as to save time, otherwise wasted, by conducting enterprise searches without finding the information being looked for. In other words enterprise search without enhancement by taxonomy software can produce irrelevant results.

Our taxonomy software classifies information in the similar way to the human brain (by categorising and attaching labels) so that the information is more findable by enterprise search engines. For example in Sharepoint metadata is applied by the taxonomy classification system to Sharepoint site columns. This allows the Sharepoint enterprise search to undertake metadata search rather than text search using the Sharepoint metadata added by the taxonomy software using taxonomy classification. This Sharepoint metadata is also used by Sharepoint to create semantic search results, displayed through the Sharepoint portal, to provide a better Findability experience.

Our certification as a Google Enterprise Partner establishes our ability to offer the benefits of taxonomy software to the Google Search Appliance (GSA). The GSA version of our taxonomy software offers taxonomy classification and semantic search for the Google Search Appliance. This yields Findability for the GSA including all the search navigation techniques mentioned above.

The GSA metadata function of our platform coupled with taxonomy classification provides a findability advantage when using Google’s enterprise search offering – the Google Search Appliance. The GSA metadata function of our taxonomy software also gives your organisation a competitive advantage and improved efficiency of infrastructure. It provides semantic search capacity to Google enterprise search. If you have deployed GSA across your organisation then boosting the metadata quality for GSA indexed documents maximises the Findability on the intranet portals that the Google enterprise search engine is pointed at, this includes offering a semantic search function for the Google Search Appliance.
 
Our certification as a Microsoft Partner for delivering Sharepoint metadata solutions makes our taxonomy software and all its benefits suitable for Sharepoint, including semantic search for Sharepoint.

The Sharepoint metadata function of our platform provides a space to organise better information management and gives you a findability advantage when using Sharepoint enterprise search. The Sharepoint metadata function of our taxonomy software also gives your organisation a competitive advantage and improved efficiency of infrastructure. It provided semantic search capacity to Sharepoint. If you have deployed Sharepoint across your organisation then boosting the Sharepoint metadata quality for Sharepoint managed documents maximises the Findability on the intranet portals that Sharepoint metadata has as its foundation, your business can now use the Sharepoint semantic search function to make content relevant to the users.

As part of our service and support package, not only do we supply the taxonomy classification software to improve classification of content, for both enterprise search and content management systems, we provide services to develop a bespoke taxonomy classification lexicon to drive the taxonomy software application. This is created with your business needs in mind, and means all users of the enterprise search engine using the semantic search experience will get best results with greater efficiency. This resultant improvement in your enterprise search efficiency means that an investment in Semaphore taxonomy software is a cost effective means of increasing your overall productivity. Productivity gains being achieved through semantic search usability and taxonomy classification findability.  Any system that helps reduce cost and reduces the risk of acting on incorrect or out of date information is a sound investment.

 

Free Webinar

Cutting Search Chaos, On 27 July 2010, with Smartlogic and Lucid Imagination


Register for a free online seminar that will discuss how Smartlogic Semaphore, the open semantic search platform, works with Apache Lucene/Solr to help users find information quickly and enhances the search/navigation experience


The webinar will be held on Tuesday, July 27 2010

North America: 11:00 PDT / 14:00 EDT

Sign up

Europe: 14:00 BST/ 15:00 CET

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Poor Quality Search Results are because Enterprise Users Tag Information Inconsistently, at Too High a Level, or Not At All

We recently presented a webinar with Microsoft and Earley & Associates to look at how Smartlogic Semaphore can improve the search capabilities of Microsoft Sharepoint and FAST ESP, and how Semaphore makes accurate tagging of enterprise data easy, leading to a better search experience for users.

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Posted: 2010-07-29


Free Webinar: Cutting Search Chaos, On 27 July 2010, with Smartlogic and Lucid Imagination

Join Smartlogic's Toby Conrad and Lucid Imagination's Eran Yaniv for a detailed debrief on how combining Semaphore with Lucene/Solr turns a good search engine into the platform for compelling, intuitive search applications.

. . . .

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Posted: 2010-07-22


How McClatchy-Tribune’s news and image database uses Semaphore to increase customer satisfaction and retention

Existing subscribers to McClatchy-Tribune’s news and image database already have access to a wide-range of comprehensive news, information on enterprises and images but they now want to improve the level of content classification and deliver more focused information. Integrating Smartlogic’s Open Semantic Platform to their database will help subscribers having to wade through thousands of results from a search and do one with the confidence that every story returned will be on the relevant subject.

For example, if a client wanted to read stories about Marriott Hotels, a general search . . . .

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Posted: 2010-07-12