The Software & Information Industry Association this year debuted a category for Best Semantic Technology Solution in its 2013 SIIA CODiE Awards. Two products were finalists in the category (see our story here), and yesterday the winner was announced. It was the Luxid Content Enrichment Platform from TEMIS Inc, which is used by publishers to automate the extraction of entities, relationships, concepts and topics from their digital assets, and augment content enrichment and linking.

It won out over finalist Elsevier with its ClinicalKey solution for helping doctors and clinicians search Elsevier’s medical and surgical content smarter and faster. ClinicalKey maps content to Elsevier’s proprietary medical taxonomy, and builds relationships using a semantic framework to faster and more clinically relevant answers. Elsevier, by the way, just ended the voting for its own ClinicalKey Key Innovator Awards, with the prize being a $10,000 grant to a U.S.-based hospital, medical school or institution that has demonstrated the most innovative use of information and technology to save lives and improve patient care.

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A new report from Hurwitz & Associates seeks to put text analytics vendors in context. In an environment where unstructured text accounts for 80 percent of the data available to companies, the market analyst and research firm has prepared a Victory Index to help companies suss out who can best help them get value from this information.

By providing the ability to analyze unstructured text, extract relevant information, and transform it into structured information, “text analytics has become a key component of a highly competitive company’s analytics arsenal,” write report authors Fern Halper, partner and principal analyst; Marcia Kaufman, COO and principal analyst; and Daniel Kirsh, senior analyst. Often, the research firm notes, companies begin to experiment with text analytics to gain insight into the unstructured text that abounds in social media, and from that move on to other use cases. For instance, they’ll discover value in mining unstructured data and using it with structured data to improve predictive models.

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