The New Release Of Semaphore Improves “self-Service” By Delivering Semantic Search Across Organisations’ Internal And External Informat
Smartlogic have announced the release of Semaphore 3.1, the latest release of the semantic platform. The new version with its revolutionary information classification capabilities increases the ability of diverse audiences to quickly find information, promoting “self service” and cutting costs.
Smartlogic’s CEO, Jeremy Bentley, explains the concept of “self service” as provided by semantic search:
“Self service involves the 3 A’s – audience, author, and algorithm. Say the author is a world-class vet, working for the Department of Agriculture, who has written a research paper on BSE. She writes the document in ‘vet speak’ and uses the terminology she’s used to. The audience in this case is a farmer, who’s worried about mad cow disease. But when he types “mad cow” into the Department of Agriculture’s website, the research paper doesn’t show up. That’s because the website’s search algorithm is too simple and has no understanding of meaning, and looks only for the words “mad” and “cow” in the documents on its system.
We could take this a step further, by assuming the farmer then phones up the Department to ask for advice about mad cow disease. The telephone operator has a third vocabulary, and she might search for ‘MCD’ on the Department’s intranet, again, turning up nothing about ‘mad cow disease’ or ‘BSE’. She’s trained to try to help the farmer answer his query, so she puts him through to the – very expensive – vet.
All this has cost the Department time, money, and credibility. With a semantic search platform on the intranet and the website, diverse vocabulary is no longer an issue and the farmer could have ‘self serviced’ his query.”
Semaphore is integrated with MS Sharepoint, internal CMSs, the Google Search Appliance and other search platforms to enhance these systems with automatic classification and to ensure these platforms can deliver semantic search capabilities to deliver fast, accurate results.