Another opportunity is in linking chemistry to biology, for example, the ability to link entity names with identifiers and property information such as SMILES, structures, HELM notation and sequence data. Hastings also sees greater potential in healthcare applications, for example better annotation and search of electronic health records.

Healthcare information is a particular focus for Silverchair, and Zarnegar described how semantic enrichment has helped one publisher in this area. ‘We recently worked with McGraw-Hill for more than two years to enrich their medical content and develop ClinicalAccess (www. clinicalaccess.com), a clinical decision support system designed to get medical professionals quickly to a very short snippet of content that answers their questions.

‘The deep semantic tagging of their content, combined with our medical thesaurus filled with hospital jargon, synonyms, acronyms, and abbreviations, allow us to handle complex queries and bring back snippets that contain the answer.