A debuting company, with five years of research and development to build out the IP and innovation and over $10 million in angel funding to do it, is having its coming-out party at the Sem Tech conference today. Founder and co-president Peter Sweeney describes the “thought networking” platform as “legitimately a foundational technology” in consumer-directed semantic networking. The basic idea behind the number of interconnected technologies that comprise the platform is enabling individual consumers, whether for personal or business requirements, to build a formal semantic representation of their thoughts and ideas. Its first application to be built on the technology, Primal Pages, essentially lets users craft an automatically-generated, custom-built web page at a unique address to which they can always return, drawn from unstructured and non-semantic open web sources (Wikipedia, Google, Amazon, Yahoo) – though if a third party wanted to enlist the software as a service and connect their own content resources to it through its API, the road map plans for that, as well.

“We often talk of semantics as a highly technical consumer science discipline, but it is the most innate human activity we can imagine,” says Sweeney. The platform composes a taxonomy or hierarchy of related terms, turning interaction into a word association game, so to speak. A topic cloud displays a number of terms related to what the user initially indicates he is thinking about, so that from there the user can refine through the semantic network of many terms interconnected beneath the surface-level query the content experience that is personal to his own requirements. Sub-pages that dive into the topic deeper can be saved, as well.

“This represents the semantics of the consumer, what their intent is for the information, and projects it out to a more formal machine-readable representation of that, and leverages it across the open Internet,” Sweeney says. The technology to synthesize knowledge is of course based on a proprietary representation model but the data can be output to expressed in RDF and other standard formats. “If we can take those simple word association queries and project from that a knowledge model that reflects what you are thinking about, that provides a brand new opportunity to build knowledge applications for consumers.”

Rather than retrieving the topics from a pre-built ontology or knowledge model, Primal synthesizes the topics in real time as consumers express their unique meanings. Consumers can access the service for free here. The paying customers will be content producers who license the technology for their own ends – publishers, retailers, advertisers, customer support departments, or any other organization that spends a lot of time, effort and money creating content and hoping they make the right bets that their web sites will reflect what their audience wants to see. Currently content manufacturing – that whole host of tasks from architecting content and knowledge modeling through to content provisioning, assembly and creation of on the web is less than ideal, Sweeney says. Providers can’t leverage all the information they have at their disposal to engage the consumer and deliver a personal and effective content experience, Sweeney says, but Primal Pages can enable their audiences to create queries and compose from the data the supplier puts out there in real time. “The publishing community is under siege at the moment – if they can find ways to be more productive, make content and information more valuable, they’re willing to make those changes,” he believes.

Primal isn’t focused just on news but of course that’s an area that seems ripe for such customization, and others have been looking to semantic technology to enable personalization as well. Sweeney thinks Primal gets around what he considers some of the limitations of other approaches. When it comes to creating an ontology and using that so you can subscribe to any topics you care about, for example, “there are lots of companies doing that and as far as it goes it provides value. But the challenge with any shared ontology is that it is difficult to represent the individual needs and requirements of consumers,” he says. “Anyone who’s used those services knows the feeling of the content glut they provide. I check [that I'm interested in] Obama and Boston Red Sox and there are 100 articles a day flowing in about those topics. What’s needed is a more personalized expression of the topics I care about that would encourage me to investigate the content.”

The company hails from Waterloo, Ontario in Canada, also the home of Blackberry maker RIM, and investors include one board member at RIM as well as Yvan Couture, now its CEO and co-president and formerly EVP of Mitra Imaging. The company originally was branded as Primal Fusion.

• Don’t forget to propose your startup for our Semantic Web Impact Awards. The deadline is Sept. 15.

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