There are three trends that I observed at SemTech 2011 in San Francisco last week.  First was the increased role of native XML databases used in combination with RDF data stores.  Second was the many natural-language processing tools and vendors at the conference.  And third was the role of semantic annotations and standards directly in web content.  I think these trends are related.

One of the keynote presentations at the SemTech 2011 conference was done by the BBC.  They presented their core architecture for managing web content as having two main components: a native XML database(MarkLogic)  for content and a RDF triple store for “metadata.”  These tools were at the core of their architecture for their web sites.

Another presentation was done by the Mayo Clinic.  They also are using MarkLogic for web content and are also using semantic web technologies.  Their diagrams show that there are many ways for these systems to interact.

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Entity Extraction is the process of automatically extracting document metadata from unstructured text documents.  Extracting key entities such as person names, locations, dates, specialized terms and product terminology from free-form text can empower organizations to not only improve keyword search but also open the door to semantic search, faceted search and document repurposing.  This article defines the field of entity extraction, shows some of the technical challenges involved, and shows how RDF can be used to store document annotations. It then shows how new tools such as Apache UIMA are poised to make entity extraction much more cost effective to an organization.

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