Semantic search engine hakia is announcing today, at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, that it is licensing its proprietary OntoSem technology to other companies. This will enable third parties to build semantic search applications. The first such customer to be made public is RiverGlass, Inc, a provider of real-time analytics. RiverGlass will integrate hakia's OntoSem technology into its analysis software.]]>
This is an interesting development by hakia - and has some parallels to the young Google, which you'll recall started out by licensing its search technology to the likes of Yahoo. But the parallels end there, because this move by hakia is more about licensing their underlying search technology to power the proprietary applications of other companies - whereas Google was a branded search app integrated into Yahoo's front-end.
According to hakia, this is what their OntoSem technology does:
- information retrieval, analysis, and distribution
- text summarization
- information assurance and security
- machine translation
- ontology support
- terminology standardization
- supply chain automation
Essentially, it will enable third parties to find and use "the meaning of language" in their applications. Hakia's definition of 'semantic search' by the way differs from the traditional Semantic Web definition, in that hakia search aims to automatically determine meaning from search queries using its algorithms - whereas Semantic Web is all about adding metadata to information to enable connections between data.
At this early stage there aren't any visuals from RiverGlass showing how they're using hakia technology, but the company told us that "we will see the biggest boon in increased relevancy of results".
Disclosure: hakia is a RWW sponsor
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