Lynda Moulton recently commented that over the last year the semantic web marketplace “has been increasingly active; new products emerge and discussion about what semantics might mean for the enterprise is constant. One thing that continues to strike me is the difficulty of explaining the meaning of, applications for, and context of semantic technologies. Those who embrace some concept of semantics are believers that search will benefit from ‘semantic technologies.’ What is less clear is how evangelists, developers, searchers and the average technology user can coalesce around the applications that will semantically enable enterprise search.”

She adds, “On the Internet content that successfully drives interest, sales, opinion and individual promotion does so through a combination of expert crafting of metadata, search engine technology that ‘understands’ the language of the inquirer and the content that can satisfy the inquiry. Good answers are reached when questions are understood first and then the right content is selected to meet expectations. In the enterprise, the same care must be given to metadata, search engine ‘meaning’ analysis tools and query interpretation for successful outcomes. Magic does not happen without people behind the scenes to meet these three criteria executing linguistic curation, content enhancement and computational linguistic programming.”

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