M+E Daily

Synaptica Explores How to Use Enterprise Taxonomies for Auto-Categorization

During the March 1 webinar “How to Use Your Enterprise Taxonomies for Auto-Categorization,” Synaptica and tech company Ontotext provided  an overview of Graphite Knowledge Studio with examples from two domains: categorization for e-commerce applications and categorization of job listings and candidate résumés.

Graphite Knowledge Studio allows taxonomists and content managers to automate the tagging and categorization of enterprise content, according to Synaptica’s website.

The tool, powered by Ontotext Text Analytics, provides several benefits that Synaptica says includes plug-and-play utilization of existing single source of truth enterprise taxonomies and ontologies; out-of-the-box tagging based on standard taxonomy semantic schema; rapid refinement of tagging accuracy by adding tagging contexts to the taxonomy; improving both recall and precision by harmonizing the semantics of search and content terminology; identifying  what is most relevant or salient; and support content recommendation and discovery.

During the webinar, Dave Clarke, founder of Synaptica, told viewers he would be providing what would be, for many of them “kind of an introduction” to Graphite Knowledge Studio. The company talked about it late last year but he was providing a more “in-depth” presentation.

He focused on inline tagging and categorization because he noted that the topic was “too big to get everything into one webinar.” So one or two more webinars are planned “where we [will] look at other things,” including extraction and machine learning, he said.

Synaptica has diversified its business over the years, expanding beyond just information science to data science as well, he said.

With Knowledge Studio, the company is “bringing these two things together,” he said of the two sciences, calling it a “sweet spot.”

Synaptica has a “deep alliance” with Ontotext, which has “deep experience in” natural language processing (NLP) and text analytics,” he said.

Synaptica, meanwhile, is “really deep in information science, control, vocabularies, taxonomies and ontology,” he said, adding:  “We’re bringing these different technical resources, these different perspectives together in the product that we call Graphite Knowledge Studio.”

Delving into labeling, he said: “This is very much where the action happens in terms of categorization. So labels are all important in taxonomy management.”

Graphite Knowledge Studio uses a Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), he said, pointing out that SKOS has become the go-to schema for managing enterprise taxonomies and unmodified SKOS can be used to support auto-categorization.

SKOS provides hidden labels, and “you can load those in” with alternative words and phrases, he noted.

SKOS are “good for managing concept schemes, which you can use to identify your metadata facets,” he said, adding: “It’s good for storing alt labels, hidden labels that can expand the number of matches that you find.”

Borislav (Borko) Ankov, product manager at Ontotext, went on to provide viewers with demonstrations.