Solutions Overview
Maximizing Information Assets and Minimizing Information Risks with Semaphore
Organizations create and consume vast amounts and different types of information. Not all information that is created is equal; nor is it considered fundamental to an organization’s business strategy. Therefore, organizations need to maximize their information assets and minimize their information risks.
Organizations can maximize the value of their information assets. How? By utilizing metadata. Metadata is often called ‘data about data’ or ‘information about information’. Metadata is structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource. “Tagging” an information asset with metadata makes it more usable and controllable. The more valuable the information asset, the more metadata it usually needs, and the more accurate and definitive that metadata has to be. Metadata is what defines and unlocks the value of data.
Tagging with metadata is just the first step. Turning metadata into business metadata using semantics is what makes it more valuable. Metadata that describes contextually relevant or domain-specific information about content (in the right context) based on an industry-specific or enterprise is known as business metadata. For example, if the content is from the business domain, the relevant business [semantic] meta data could be company name, ticker symbol, industry, sector, executives, etc., whereas if the content is from the intelligence domain, the relevant semantic meta data could be terrorist name, event, location, organization, etc.
Benefits of Metadata
Metadata for Facilitating Findability and Reusability: Tagging information with metadata significantly enhances its findability. Metadata also improves the consistency and quality of the output so content can be repurposed and reused slashing time it takes to create new content.
Metadata for Governance of Content: Metadata provides information governance, which is the set of policies, procedures, guidelines, rules and compliance metrics that helps maintain information within a system.
To ensure organizations deal with metadata appropriately, Smartlogic has developed Semaphore. Semaphore is an enterprise semantic platform that uniquely captures an organization’s subjects and topics into a taxonomy or ontology [model] and enhances traditional information management systems like search, content management and business workflow engines by adding advanced content classification, metadata enrichment, and navigation capabilities to deliver a more complete enterprise information management experience.
- Media companies use Semaphore to improve the quality of their information feeds, boosting distribution, readership & subscriptions
- Government authorities use Semaphore to tag information according to their standards, for compliance, intelligence processing & citizen self-service.
- Healthcare companies use Semaphore to boost the level of self-service and improve the quality of critical health information they provide to patients
- Investment banks use Semaphore to consolidate their costs, better promote their primary research and for contract compliance.
- Online directories use Semaphore to increase their advertising revenues
- Corporate intranets & websites use Semaphore to boost their use and maximize their return on information assets.
- Knowledge intensive companies use Semaphore to manage their vast content reserves using taxonomies and ontologies, classification schemes and records retention policies.
