Text, Data and the Roman Roads: Semantic Enrichment

What do you think is the common thread between the Great Roman Empire and your Great scientific research, journalistic report or financial analysis?

In a word, it is interconnectedness.

These are the avenues that connect objects to make a rich system of intelligent pathways throughout your content management system and across the web.

The interconnectedness of Roman Roads.

Among the things that made the Roman Empire great were its roads. The communication channels linking Rome to its colonies fostered further expansion, making exchange thrive throughout the entire empire. With building military roads in mind, what Romans actually created was a vital infrastructure that facilitated the movement of goods, people and ideas.

It is that same facilitating of communication and information exchange within the infrastructure of an organization’s content assets that can make knowledge discovery flourish.

Harnessing the Power of Text Through Metadata

When everything is interlinked, the interconnected parts are more easily remixed, recombined, repurposed, you name it.

And semantic enrichment (also known as semantic annotation) is exactly that, enriching textual content with additional, well-defined information which can be processed by computers. Words become not only words but rather easy-to-search and easy-to-use, machine-readable pieces of data.

Setting Knowledge Free with Semantic Enrichment

By telling a computer how data items are related and how these relations can be evaluated automatically, the processing of complex filter and search operations becomes possible. And this is vital for efficient content management and knowledge discovery.

How Can Semantic Enrichment Help Your Business?

Trying to make good use and sense of their content assets, today enterprises realize that they are “virtually sitting on more text data than they have ever experienced before.”

As a structural solution to the growing amount of data organizations face, the last decade has seen the emergence of “intelligent content”. The data pieces created by semantic enrichment are the building blocks of this type of content. These building blocks allow content to travel across multiple channels, platforms and systems. They help you connect the dots, get deeper insights, guide your research and last but not least aid the uncovering of hidden relationships.

Depending on what you need and expect from your organization’s content assets, semantic enrichment can solve some of the most common problems, allowing for:

• effective search in databases and archives
• integration of heterogenous sources of data
• faster information retrieval
• more accurate research
• automated relationships discovery/mapping
• neatly stored (regularly updated) domain knowledge
• automatically aggregate, repurpose and reuse content.

How Does Semantic Enrichment Work?

Creative chaos might work for you but not for everyone else trying to make sense of your content.

So, in order to make our ambiguous, difficult-to-interpret, often messy and heterogenous content a neat set of machine-processable data pieces, semantic enrichment comes into play.

It adds machine-readable meaning to specific chunks of text, thus taking them to the next level, where what they contain can be boiled down to reusable information, opening the door for better search and presentation in an organization’s content or web-wide.

Semantic Enrichment Step-by-step

In order for a text to become a neat set of data pieces, it is put through a number of text-enrichment steps.

Step 1

Text is extracted from articles, documents or any form of unstructured data.

Step 2

After sentences are split, the important concepts are identified through dictionary word lists.

Step 3

Machine learning algorithms classify and disambiguate the identified concepts.

Step 4

Relationships between the entities are also identified.

Step 5

The facts and the original reference to the articles are indexed and stored with corresponding classifications and relationships in a triplestore.

Here’s how, in five steps, information is given well-defined meaning and becomes ready to join other data pieces, enabling new combinations, insights and cross-references.

Collectively, this powerful blend of relationships, classifications, explicit & inferred facts and unstructured data allow organizations to understand and interrogate their content and data at a much finer grain of detail.

Excerpt from: The Truth about Triplestores

It is through this extraction of structured, processable data from a free-flowing textual content that we can help computers help us. And it is through semantic enrichment that we can “package” our content in a way that would further allow its easy traveling across platforms and devices.

To get back to the Roman infrastructure reference, with semantic enrichment, we have the unique opportunity to interconnect objects and thus facilitate information exchange and knowledge discovery. Just like Roman roads did.

Excited about how semantic enrichment changes the way we create and consume content?

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