Semantic Technologies & Knowledge Management

I think the stage is set for the technologies that help navigate and manage unstructured information in corporations. Many vendors sell products now including Autonomy, ClearForest, InXight, Stratify, SAS, Entrieva, Verity, and Vivisimo. Typical capabilities offered by these products include automatic classification, summarization, taxonomy generation, clustering and concept-based information retrieval. Eventually I think the core technologies themselves will get commoditized (even free and open source) though there will always be premier products.

The real challenge will be to roll out solutions based on these technologies, often combined with other systems such as business process management and collaboration systems, that address specific problems. For example, large engineering organizations can insert these capabilities in their PLM and benefit significantly. Or PLM vendors can integrate them in their products. For hiring managers, wouldn't they be happy to see a neat classification of resumes, preferrably ranked aginst job openings, in stead of requiring them to go through and manually classify them? Vivisimo already does a decent job of categorizing web search results obtained from multiple search engines - not good enough to be my default search engine, but do find it useful often.

The next level of technologies using metadata, topic maps, ontologies and such will take a bit longer considering the need for better planning and higher level of effort. Tools should help us adapt them faster (e.g., automatic metadata generation, automatic topic creation for topic maps, etc).