News the Enterprise Can Use

By Jennifer Zaino on December 2, 2009 8:56 AM

by Jennifer Zaino

Semantic web technologies can deliver something valuable to companies: News they can use. More semantic web-based offerings are emerging that aim at helping the enterprise set discover the news they need to improve corporate research and competitive intelligence, among other things. You can read about one of them, Feedly, here, and over the next few days we’ll explore some of the other options available to your business.

We’ll start today with:

Eqentia.Com

Semantic technologies are a means to an end for this knowledge management solution, aimed at the prosumer users in organizations whose job is to consume news â€“ not spend their time looking for it or configuring RSS readers or Twitter streams to get what they need. In his past life, as VP of global marketing at IT services provider Cognizant, Eqentia Inc. founder and CEO William Mougayar recognized how important it is to follow the news that’s germaine to the particular segment one works in. So he started Eqentia as a news aggregation engine, but “that’s not the end of it,” he says. “I understand you have to add a lot of value on top of aggregation, and one of those value points is to do entity extraction on each piece of content.”

The free faces Eqentia presents to the world are its special purpose vertical portals into something over a dozen topics, aggregating news on specialty areas such as cloud computing, enterprise 2.0, techVC, and, yes, the semantic web. That’s where prosumers might get started with the engine, and Mougayar hopes their satisfaction and success there will lead to their company’s signing on to the service’s enterprise software-as-a-service solution for in-depth and customizable news on the topics that matter most to them. Mougayar cites a bank whose vp of cash management and treasury configured a portal to track his competition and the key issues in his field; a government organization in Canada for which Eqentia is creating a portal focused on foreign direct investment in the country; and a research group at a large bank in the U.S. that is following a particular technology segment. “They can’t go to Google news or a generic news aggregator,” says Mougayar. “You need some special purpose tools like we have.”

So, what is so special about Eqentia’s special-purpose tools? Subscribers to the free and fee services can lock onto up to ten Semantic Connections — semantically rich tags that have all the synonyms and relations pertaining to a particular sub-category â€“ per portal. They can narrow down the Semantic Web topic, for example, to get daily email digests that reference only posts on Semantic Web search or RDF. Even if a story about the semantic web doesn’t use the word “search” per se but is about that web practice, it will be represented in the findings. Semantic Connections enables faceted searching, which lets users continually filter available information â€“ from social media, to social media and its relation to the future of work, to social media, the future of work and the mobility aspect of it all â€“ while accounting for all those words’ semantic relationships. Users can perform semantic search queries to look at more than three facets.

Connections and web/social media on-ramps, sharing, researching and saving functions, as well as RSS feeds for a Connection and links to other related portals, are available as expanding sections under articles.

Mougayar says what sets Eqentia apart from GoogleNews or competitors in the semantic news aggregator sector is that it is more comprehensive â€“ that it goes deeper, with more relevance, and no junk in the results. As of 515 pm on November 17, for instance, he points to Eqentia’s Semantic Web portal as having 22 articles/relevant tweets in the past 24 hours on the Semantic Web. GoogleNews, he says, had an average of 1 or 2 articles per day. “I searched for “Semantic Web” on Feedly, and it seems to pull articles from GoogleNews but showing even less articles, 1 per 4-5 days in some cases,” he says.

“As a special purpose aggregator we have a lot more control on sources and what we do with each feed — whether that’s filtered or not and what rules to apply against them — plus the semantic part behind the scenes and the text mining provides a more complete and comprehensive and deep view of the news you are after in a particular field,” he says. For example, Eqentia understands and automatically accounts for the fact that terms ranging from infrastructure as a service to hardware as a service to elastic computing all fall under the concept of cloud computing. To get all the information on cloud computing — no matter how it’s phrased in a particular piece of content — on a regular basis would require manually setting up a number of different news feeds for discovery services such as Google offers.

Other features of the service include geographic depictions of articles across clickable hot spots, 30-day trendgrams by Connections, and visual semantic querying.

Each Eqentia portal has its own taxonomy, a controlled vocabulary that is its basis and which is also configurable and flexible for businesses that subscribe to the fee-based service. Users can, for instance, add other people to the People entity, or rename the Regions entity to something that makes more sense for their organization, or make new Semantic Connections within any portal entity. “The key requirement for me was that a non-technical person can configure from start to finish a new portal environment just by manipulating the dashboard,” Mougayar says. “In this case it’s really about knowledge management. If you know what your topics are, what you want to track, we configure it, and then the system starts to track it.”

Companies who choose to subscribe to the fee based service â€“ which costs about $5,000 to set up plus a monthly fee per portal â€“ are not limited in what information sources they can draw from. For instance, one client wants to put Factiva on the back end, Mougayar sys. “We don’t care where the information comes from, RSS feeds or private or public sources,” he says. “We can feed that into our engine and then organize the content and personalize it for that particular department. So we can connect it to the back end information content services they’ve already paid a lot of money for, and just surface it with a greater degree of personalization.”

Eqentia also offers an API for the publishing sector to publish already semanticized content on their site. It expects to announce customers of that service soon. Eqentia also plans to add more vertical topics on its public site, including opening more business lines such as leadership management, branding and change management.

To be continuedâ€¦