Smartlogic Semaphore

The word Ontology derives from the Greek ‘to be’ and is the philosophical study of nature being. Ontology was traditionally listed as part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics and deals with questions relating to what entities exist or can be said to exist and how they can be related or grouped within a hierarchy.

So how does grouping and adding relationships of terms that are housed in a hierarchy or organizational structure apply to the management of information?

Ontology can be applied to information management because search software driven by ontology (or ontological modeling of relationships) makes defining information and its properties easy; it makes information findable and adds relevancy to the search results. With an ontology created especially for your business and information needs, searching for information linked by any number of grouping criteria becomes possible. Ontologies allow for the processing of information semantically in a way that endows meaning and is therefore more "human" or natural. Ontology driven search offers significant benefits over normal search engines or information management systems. Given an ontology approach to information we can facilitate the management of information from any number of different existing systems. Truly integrated information is how you get the information you need, in the form that you need it, when you need it.

Busy people need the right information, at the right time. If they are unable to find relevant information in a timely and effective manner, this leads to great frustration and a waste of valuable time. In the corporate environment this leads to reduced productivity and increased costs.

The search engines are not at fault, they simply do not have the necessary ingredients of metadata nor the functionality to deliver semantic search when presented with an overwhelming amount of information

The beauty of Smartlogic’s Semaphore software is that you harness the power of the semantic model (be it a taxonomy or ontology) to drive classification, which creates the ingredient of quality metadata and adds the semantic functionality to compliment the search engine and end user experience. One big problem is that people use different words to search other than those words used to write the information or be responsible for labeling it. The growing understanding and adoption of semantic search software highlights the importance of the search results needing to be in context to the topic being searched. Semaphore is semantic middleware that gives a helping hand during searches. It is a sophisticated program with different modules including an ontology/taxonomy management tool, ability to have fully automatic, semi-automatic and manual classification and search enhancement services that augment the search engine experience with conceptual mapping, topics, taxonomy navigator, A-Z directories and best bets. Smartlogic’s Semaphore software has simply revolutionised searching for any user. Search becomes Find.

The biggest frustration for people who search for information on the internet is the sheer vastness of information available on the public web and the same is true for corporate intranets and content management systems. Unless your search criteria is exactly matched to the authors use of language or is so obscure to allow only a few results when searching you are confronted with too many results, often with little or obvious relevancy or association to your search criteria. Ambiguity and overload are the order of the day and this in an environment where information is crying out to be found with quality metadata (labels) on pages assisting the search engines. The same issues apply for corporate intranets and content repositories, whereby in many cases the situation is magnified even further due to a lack of metadata (labels) and organizing structure being applied to information.

For any popular word or topic search on the web you will literally be given millions of results. It is not possible to search through hundreds of pages of results to find the exact information you want. In the corporate environment your search can often return few results with any relevancy. This is a major concern as the requirement for quality within an enterprise is far higher than for public content. And paradoxically even more so is the risk that relevant information is simply not found at all due to an ineffective labeling and an organization silo nature.