December 29, 2008
Where “semantic” technology is or isn’t important
At Lynda Moulton’s behest, I spoke a couple of times recently on the subject of where “semantic” technology is or isn’t likely to be important. One was at the Gilbane conference in early December. The slides were based on my previously posted deck for a June talk I gave on a text analytics market overview. The actual Gilbane slides may be found here.
My opinions about the applicability of semantic technology include:
- The big bucks in web search are for “transactional” web search, and semantics isn’t the issue there. (Slides 3-4)
- When UIs finally go beyond the simple search box — e.g. to clusters/facets or to voice — semantics should have a role to play. (Slide 5)
- Public-facing site search depends — more than any other area of text analytics — on hand-tagging. (Slide 7)
- “Enterprise” search that searches specialized external databases could benefit from semantic technologies. (Slide 8)
- True enterprise search could benefit from semantic technologies in multiple ways, but has other problems as well. (Slides 10-11)
- Semantics — specifically extraction — is central to custom publishing. (Slide 12 — upon review I regret using the word “sophisticated”)
- Semantics is central to text mining. (Slide 18)
- Semantics could play a big role in all sorts of exciting future developments. (Slide 19)
So what would your list be like?