Smartlogic Semaphore

What we do: We help our customers to develop taxonomy-driven solutions

We’re a software business, and Semaphore is our product. If required, we help clients to source, develop and deploy a taxonomy to drive Semaphore.

Over 200 businesses and government organisations use Semaphore – our customers range from UK councils, to media businesses and global investment banks. More on our customers?

Semaphore is semantic middleware (or, taxonomy-based software for human-friendly solutions)

Semaphore uses a bespoke-to-customer taxonomy to reflect the way that your business, and your customers, see the world. The taxonomy part is important, as it lets you classify content on several subjects, and the relationships* between sub-topics within those subjects. Just like a human brain would.

Semaphore is what many people are calling ‘semantic middleware’ – software that sits between content repositories and users, and has a human-brain-type approach to organising and categorising content.

* (Strictly speaking, only an ontology can include a relationship between sub-topics – find out more about taxonomy matters).

Why it works: A human-friendly approach to search, and added metadata

We think that there are two key things that make Semaphore work for our clients:

• It’s driven by a taxonomy; you can organise content in a human-friendly way.
• It makes taxonomy-based metadata available to multiple systems; you can use that metadata to take control of your content.

To help explain what we mean, here are four examples of how our clients use Semaphore:

1. Adding metadata in a Content Management System (CMS)
   Semaphore can add sophisticated metadata in a website CMS – a neat solution where swathes of content lack a useful level of metadata.
2. Using metadata to drive enterprise or federated search
   Because Semaphore’s taxonomy can include multiple equivalent-terms for words and data-tags, it can drive enterprise search and federated-search solutions. These techniques are part of our business-information portal approach.
3. ‘Reveal’ content with an enhanced search-navigation experience
   Semaphore transforms the search-navigation experience because it gives the users lots of useful search features (e.g. faceted search, disambiguation).
4. Route, or forward, content according to pre-set rules
   Imagine a fund manager’s in-box, stuffed with over a thousand emails and research reports. One of our clients uses Semaphore as an electronic super-secretary to scan incoming emails, and route relevant content to fund managers.