According to Jeff Dirks, president and CEO of SchemaLogic, media and publishing companies were grappling with how to describe many types of digital content—text, video, audio, photographs, and more. The amount of content was massive, while the tags used in these enterprises were numerous and hard to track. He said that organizations need a common, enterprisewide language, or semantic standard, that is flexible, can respond in real time, and can enable all users of corporate information to easily classify or tag data quickly and consistently. The SchemaLogic Enterprise Suite can serve as the needed manager to make this happen.

"Given the myriad of free content across the Web, it is no secret that the media and publishing market has gone through a tremendous transformation over the past decade," said Dirks. "These leading organizations know they need to optimize their information syndication services and aggressively take a hard look at subscription revenues. Through the use of enterprise-wide Business Semantics Management solutions, they are able to aggressively compete with the multitude of open source content providers which ultimately results in accelerated revenue."

The SchemaLogic solution provides a participatory framework for tagging and focuses on handling the semantics governance layer. It works with existing content management, search, and other tools used by publishers, such as Microsoft SharePoint, Documentum, IBM products, FAST, and others. Dirks said its goal is to be seamless and behind-the-scenes for the information worker—the software manages the definitions and relationships among content tags, resolving any differences that might occur.

Customer Use

Corbis is using the SchemaLogic Enterprise Suite to manage the semantics used to describe the company’s growing digital images, illustrations, and videos. "The SchemaLogic solution, which helps us manage our Cataloging vocabulary, translates directly into an improved customer search experience," said Stephen Gillett, vice president of technology for Corbis. "To remain competitive, we need comprehensive, targeted, and accurate search results. We need a business semantics management solution to provide valuable services to our customers, and SchemaLogic’s proven solution is the best one out there."

The SchemaLogic solution provides a framework that enables AP to model the structures and relationships of the tags that describe its vast media content. The solution enables dynamic changes to the model through a Web-based governance process that allows participation across the organization and facilitates the development and enrichment of the tagging model in a constantly changing environment. The SchemaLogic solution enables editorial tools, auto-tagging software, search engines, and portals to store, access, and create content using a consistent global model of the tags that describe the media assets within the organization. AP uses Teragram software (www.teragram.com) for auto-tagging and entity extraction.

Amy Sweigert, director of Information Management at AP, said, "With SchemaLogic, we have implemented a common tagging vocabulary across our entire organization to help organize and manage our content, providing a way for us to leverage the full value of our information assets. We believe this implementation will enable us to further provide valuable services for our customers now and into the future."

Sweigert said it has allowed AP to manage very large sets of vocabularies and create rich relationships between content. The solution works with some 3,000 subject terms and many thousands of entities. She feels it will definitely help AP to create more targeted information products for its customers. She considers the SchemaLogic product to be "the best one out there."

Market Opportunity

With the increasing pressures felt by media and publishing enterprises to stay competitive in a Web-based world, products like SchemaLogic are likely to look increasingly attractive. Other providers of taxonomy and semantics management products will also be pushing to promote their solutions to this hungry market.

Industry expert Mills Davis, managing director of Project10X (www.project10x.com),stressed that the Internet has vastly expanded the opportunities for micro-targeting content and media products. To address these opportunities, publishers find they need to better and more flexibly organize their digital content assets. He said, "[N]ot only must publishers harmonize internally how their different assets are organized and the terminology different units use to describe them, but they must also be able to understand, respond, and support how various customers need to see this content presented to them. SchemaLogic’s approach is unique in that it provides one solution for media and publishers to solve all these problems in a way that that lets them maximize their existing investment in content and legacy systems."

Davis added: "Publishers are seeking capabilities that have a number of components, such as content auto-categorizers, enterprise/Web search engines, content management systems, content authoring and editorial systems, etc. No one software company provides the whole solution. The reality for publishers is heterogeneous systems that need now to work together in a new way. SchemaLogic’s solution provides the social collaborative process and technological glue for managing the semantics (meanings and knowledge about systems and content) that enable various components of the publisher’s whole solution (both legacy and new) to interoperate effectively in support of an Internet strategy."

Background

SchemaLogic was founded in 2004 by Trevor Traina, who previously founded Compare.net, Inc., which was sold to Microsoft Corp. in 1999. While at Microsoft, Traina met co-founder Breanna Anderson, who was a software architect and program manager at Microsoft and MSNBC Interactive. Reportedly, while working within MS she became interested in the problem of semantics management when attempting to work across various development groups within MS on collaboration software for data asset management. SchemaLogic is based in Kirkland, Wash., and currently has 40 employees.