Today marks International Women’s Day 2013, and Dow Jones & Company is marking the date with a video and infographics that looks at women’s evolution in business. The data informing these elements comes from its Factiva information service, which recently enhanced its metadata and taxonomy credentials with MarkLogic Corp.’s search technology (see our story here).

Factiva was used to map media mentions of women executives in search of the top 20 over the past ten years. The featured individuals are ranked in the infographic according to the number of mentions received in publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Barron’s to China’s People’s Daily.

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Dow Jones & Company’s Factiva information service has long been distinguished by the semantic tools it applies to its content to surface relevant search information. Last week the company announced what it says is one of the most significant investments it’s made in the Factiva product suite, licensing new search technology from MarkLogic Corp.

The arrangement is positioned as providing standardized search technology across the Dow Jones digital network, including Factiva, WSJ.com and Dow Jones Financial Services products. To be specific, the investment in one underlying search technology that will be used by the company’s multiple businesses and products means that, “one powerful, unified search platform will service the search needs of our consumer and enterprise customers around the world,” says Georgene Huang, head of Factiva. “Any improvements or customizations we build atop this infrastructure will be scalable and efficiently accessible to all.” That will allow better and easier synergies between the development, products and the content, she says.

The new search technology, Huang says, complements its continuing investment in Factiva’s core metadata and taxonomy strengths in many ways.

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You’ve just been semanticized. Or, you might be if you’re a member of an organization that subscribes to Dow Jones Factiva. The information service known for the semantic tools it applies to its content, including its company, industry, region, and subject taxonomies, in order to surface relevant information in searches, sees an opportunity to increase its service’s value by considering the people part of the search picture.

“An important aspect of filtering is the human aspect,” says Greg Merkle, Factiva’s VP of Product Strategy & Design. “There are those who consume information and those who package and curate it. So we’ve developed a series of personas to understand the ecosystem of information inside the enterprise – how users connect, how they do their work, and so on.”

As Factiva aims to be more about awareness and monitoring vs. a pure research and search tool, it’s important for it to have insight into the meaning of individuals’ specific user roles, to know what they do at a deeper and more meaninful level than the general classification of them as information professionals or end users or, more recently, corporate knowledge worker.

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