There’s more than one way to get a taxonomy. A company can go out and buy one for its industry, for instance, but the risk is that the terms may not relate to how it talks about content in its own organization, and the hierarchy may not be the right fit either. That sets up two potential outcomes, says Chris Riley, VP of marketing at Pingar: You wind up having to customize it, or with users who just ignore it.

It’s possible to build one, but that’s a big job and a costly one, too – especially for many enterprises, where there hasn’t traditionally been a focus on structuring content and so the skills to do it aren’t necessarily there. While industries like publishing, oil and gas, life sciences, and pharma have that bent, many other verticals do not. In fact, Riley notes, they may realize they have a content organization problem, but not that what they’d benefit from to address it even goes by the name ‘taxonomy.’

Pingar’s looking to help out those enterprises that want to bring organization to their content, whether or not they’re familiar with the concept of a taxonomy. It just launched its automated Taxonomy Generator Service that uses an organization’s own content to build a taxonomy that mirrors its own way of talking about things and its understanding of relationships between child and parent terms.

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Anthony Myers of CMS Wire reports, “Semantic search provider Smartlogic is ready to integrate its Semaphore platform into Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013, and upgrades include more ontology related Web parts and better multi-farm support for large-scale deployments. Semaphore already integrates with SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint 2010, and now that the 2013 version is here, Smartlogic has added customer requests like automating classifications to its enterprise search capabilities. ‘We’ve simplified certain key information management processes, such that manual effort is no longer needed,’ Matthieu Jonglez, Smartlogic chief technology officer said in a statement.” Read more

Callimachus is getting an update. It’s been quiet for a few months over at the framework for data-driven applications based on Linked Data principles, but with good reason, says David Wood, CTO of Callimachus project sponsor 3 Round Stones. 3 Round Stones also offers Callimachus Enterprise, winner of this year’s Startup Competition at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco.

Big things were on the menu for this release, which should emerge from beta today. To date, all the RDF that Callimachus has dealt with has been local to it, Wood explains. “People have been saying for ages, ‘But I don’t want to copy the LOD cloud into Callimachus to deal with it. I want to deal with a lot of data out there in the world, in enterprise systems, an Oracle server, or the LOD cloud,” he says.

The new release takes on the challenge of dealing with data that’s external to Callimachus.

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In this segment of our “Innovation Spotlight” we spoke with Andreas Blumauer, the CEO of  Semantic Web Company. Semantic Web Company is headquartered in Vienna, Austria and their software extracts meaning from big data using linked data technologies. In this interview Andreas describes some of the their core products to us in more detail.

Sean: Hi Andreas. Can you give us a little background on your company? When did you get started in the Semantic Web?

Andreas: As an offspring of a ‘typical’ web agency from the early days of the internet, we became a specialized provider in 2004: The ‘Semantic Web School’ focused on research, consulting and training in the area of the semantic web. We learned quickly how the idea of a ‘semantic web’ was able to trigger a lot of great project visions but also, that most of the tools from the early days of the semantic web were rather scary for enterprises. In 2007 we experienced that information professionals began to search for grown-up semantic web solutions to improve their information infrastructure. We were excited that ‘our’ main topics obviously began to play a role in the development of IT-strategies in many organizations. We refocused on the development of software and renamed our company.

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According to a new article out of the company, “Concept Searching, a global leader in semantic metadata generation, auto-classification, and taxonomy management software, and developer of the Smart Content Framework™, is pleased to announce that its core products, conceptSearch and conceptClassifier for SharePoint, are up and running for SharePoint 2013.” Read more

Smartlogic recently released a new version of its Semaphore software, which took home the 2011 European Frost & Sullivan Technology Innovation Award. Version 3.3 adds new semantically-rich features, but the company itself has been shifting its strategy to talk about its solution less as the enterprise semantic platform and more as a content intelligence platform for identifying, classifying, extracting, analyzing and utilizing hard-to-find information from among unstructured assets in existing information management systems like Microsoft SharePoint.

Why? According to marketing VP Maya Natarajan, it’s an in to better customer access. “Whenever you think of the word semantic, there’s such a small percentage of the population that understands what it is,” she says. “But amazingly the uptake for content intelligence is so great. People immediately understand that so much quicker” — that is, she says, that content intelligence describes all the business reasons and benefits for deploying an enterprise semantic platform.

Another way to make the virtues of content intelligence even more obvious: Smartlogic is planning to introduce prebuilt starter taxonomies to kickstart the process in some vertical sectors. Meanwhile, Version 3.3 has brought to its customers features that still proclaim its semantic heritage, including a semantic visualization tool.

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