Mayer also summed up his predictions: ‘Today semantic enrichment is often used to provide a more compelling experience accessing content. In the future, we believe it will play a fundamental role in helping publishers organise knowledge, restructure the way it is packaged and consumed, placing the end-user and their preoccupations at the centre of the equation, and positioning themselves more as service providers rather than content providers.

‘Topic Pages are an example of how semantic enrichment helps build focused, thematic products that address particular needs of the end-user at a particular point in their workflow, for example helping them save time by accessing specific information when they need it, and actually helping them avoid “having to read” all of the corresponding literature.

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.

Silverchair’s Jake Zarnegar noted that, ‘Publishers use semantics to enhance the core functions of their existing products (such as search, navigation/collections, and related content suggestions); to assemble programmatically targeted new content products that are relevant to specific audiences; to integrate granularly with third-party information sources; and to gain better business intelligence about the particular information needs of our audiences to guide sales,

Daniel Mayer, VP product and marketing at TEMIS, gave some examples of the ways this approach is being used: ‘Semantic enrichment is helping publishers make their content more compelling, drive audience engagement and content usage by providing metadata-based discoverability features such as search-engine optimisation, improved search, taxonomy/faceted navigation, links to structured information about topics mentioned in content, “related content”, and personalisation.’

Silverchair offers semantic enrichment project services and tools. These include strategic semantic planning services and a taxonomy/ontology manager (Totem). The company also provides taxonomy development services, an automated semantic enrichment engine that tags content down to the most granular level (Tagmaster) and a web delivery platform that uses semantically enriched content to drive advanced features and new product creation (SCM6). It also provides an analytics platform that combines user activity with semantic tagging to create detailed business intelligence about audiences and their information preferences (Silvermine).