Semantinet has transitioned its HeadUp technology from a browser extension for end users to help them discover content to a hosted service that enriches publishers’ content with semantic content analysis and automatically generated topic pages that consolidate related materials from their internal repositories or across the web. Now it has some new plans in the works for that audience.

Next month will see a refresh of its site that includes a self-service installation for publishers to ease and speed deployment of its technology atop their content management systems, for one thing. Also in the queue are enhancements to its reporting capabilities. “Obviously we report to each site what content users are interested in, because we can go down to entities and categories, so on a large site with a lot of content we can tell them the most interesting topics of the day and which articles were popular around them, which helps publishers decide what to write about,” says founder and CEO Tal Keinan. An addition underway in support of publishers’ better understanding the quality of topic pages is a service it plans to enable in conjunction with Amazon Mechanical Turk’s workforce marketplace.

“Mechanical Turk is a cheap and efficient way of improving the quality of content,” says Keinan. “A publisher can say that because we create a very large number of topics, let’s take the top 1,000 topic pages you created and for each one let’s improve the quality of the pictures and video you pull in from YouTube, because these are important for us and worth 2 cents per topic. What they get in return is even better quality on the content that appears on these topic pages.”

Keinan, who recently moved stateside from the company’s Israeli base to focus on business development and sales, says he’s seen a growing recognition among publishers about the value of semantic web technologies for publishers to augment their content to increase site engagement and attract new visitors from search engines. “There is a sweet spot where you talk about the benefits of doing semantic analysis from the perspective of the features it brings to the site and how it is being used. There is more traction and more understanding, and they’re talking in technical terms like precision and recall,” he says. “Even if there is not a really advanced understanding of RDFa compliant tags and technologies, they understand that they need to understand how X is related to Y, and usually that equals unique semantic analysis on the content.” 

And even if not, he says, usually springing the word “local” on them perks up the discussion. Semantinet has plans to offer among its analytics capabilities the ability to identify locations in articles, “and from there you know the geo-coordinates, the neighborhoods. So even if sites don’t care for one topic or another, once you say semantic analysis can tell the location appropriate for an article, which means they can do different sections of their site for different neighborhoods or to target content for different areas, that gets things going,” he says. Clearly, a potential plus the content providers recognize from this is the ability to target local ads better by understanding what the articles are about.  

Among some of the early content provider customers for Semantinet are The Jerusalem Post, which has integrated into its toolbar a trending topics feature so readers can see all articles relevant to topics such as the General Assembly gathering in New Orleans sponsored by the Jewish Federations of North America. The JPost hews more closely to pulling content from within their own network, but another site, the movie-oriented Heyyouguys.co.uk, uses the technology to draw from around the web to improve the content experiences. Among the capabilities Semantinet enables for that site are topic pages that let users explore actors, their work relationships with other actors, related topics, and relevant videos and photos from other sites.

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