Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

With 350,000 entries in its semantic network, 2.8 million connections among them, and 3,500 rules on top of them, Expert System USA is betting that its new semantic applications are going to help businesses and governments solve the guessing game when it comes to three key areas: advertising insight, the voice of the customer, and situational awareness.

The company just released Cogito Monitor, a product designed to address the second issue, in a version aimed at the auto industry, and will debut Cogito Focus for situational awareness for the first time in public at the upcoming Semantic Technology (SemTech) Conference. The advertising placement tool based on its technology is due in the third or fourth quarter.

While these products are new, the Italy-headquartered company has been concentrating on language technology for 15 years. J. Brooke Aker, CEO of the USA subsidiary, calls it the largest semantic technology company in the world. Its Cogito Language Technology platform of semantic intelligence for knowledge management is used by services including Radar Networks' Twine and the Wikipedia Q&A system AskWiki. The generic technology, which includes semantic search, categorizer, discovery, intelligence and contact, can transform unstructured information in structured data that can be managed with standard databases.

The new applications provide a more out-of-the-box solution for companies to address the language problems when it comes to search as we mostly know it today: 1) same word, different meaning; 2) different words, same meaning, and 3) different words, related meaning. That adds up to a lack of meaning-based processing, which generally results in either an overload or underload of returned information for all but the most expert searchers. Expert Systems touts as its unique strength its semantic network that is not only a dictionary of definitions but the relationships among all those definitions on a number of different levels.

"Most technologies only guess at meaning -- keywords, shallow linguistics, statistics. We use our deep semantic network to go beyond that -- terms, abbreviations, connections, concepts, domains, meaning, phrases," says Aker.

The network resides as part of its algorithms either inside a company or an organization can host it as a web service. As an example, he notes that a search on disability information would miss results having to do with equal opportunity law. Customers can leverage the connections in its network, which Aker says is the company's unique strength, to write rules in the development environment that encompass information they don't know ahead of time themselves--for example, to include all the towns in a certain state simply by writing code. Just use the code for the state of, say, Nebraska, and indicate that should include all its ancestors (towns). "You don't' have to list them out, the network takes care of that," says Aker. "So it's easy to write rich rules to correctly identify some town you may have never heard of."
The aim is to have the computer do the work of connecting the dots, not the people. How that plays out in Cogito Monitor, for understanding what customers are saying about cars via blogs, is this: Expert System looks at about 1,000 new blog posts a day, up to 370,000 posts over last four years, measuring sentiments and connections car buyers are trying to make.

"The long and short of this is, here is a research tool that embodies the principal that says there is a wealth of information valuable to us as a business or consumer, but we never have enough time, patience or human memory to add it all up to se what it has to tell me," says Aker.

"If we can deploy semantics and make them accurate, precise, make them have tremendous recall, suddenly that information becomes alive. That's valuable for the corporation because information is free of charge if we can only process it. Consumers are telling us what we think of their product -- why can't we take advantage of that?"

The company plans additional versions for other industries, such as telco and electronics, to debut throughout the year.

The situational awareness offering is designed to model probabilistic forecasts for anything from product launches on the corporate end to, on the government's side, perhaps an accumulation of a certain range of technologies being worked on in sequence by a rogue state that might add up to a weapon of mass destruction. "So you can write those rules in the development environment, deploy it in this interface so an analyst can look through vast amounts of information and ask for a screen of those triples, who is doing what to whom, when, and where and graphically be shown those relationships," says Aker.