Cognition Technologies, a tech company based in Los Angelos, has been hard at work for the past 23 years developing Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The result: a semantic map with over 10 million connections, which Cognition claims is the largest semantic map in the world.
What is a semantic map? It is basically a way of teaching a computer what a word means based on its meaning. For example, a "diamond" might mean a gemstone with an inflated value based on a false perception of its rarity when used all alone, but it means something very different when it comes right after the word "baseball." Of course, that is simplifying it quite a bit. For a more detailed explanation, Richard MacManus has a great writeup about semantic maps over at ReadWriteWeb.
Many believe that the semantic web is the cornerstone to Web 3.0. While I think it's a bit too early to define the next generation of the web (we tend to do a better job defining generations after the fact), the semantic web is a key tool for an increasingly difficult problem: how to find the right piece of information on a web that is being flooded with new information every day. And a comprehensive semantic map is the key to building a semantic web.
But a semantic map has applications beyond powering commercial search engines. It can also be the backbone of enterprise search engines providing a more precise search which does a better job at linking a customer or employee to the piece of information they are trying to find.
Image © Cognition Technologies