We have used a sophisticated array of AI/Machine Learning systems in combination with statistical methods, background knowledge and expert defined rules engines, to create, entirely automatically, a structured database with high quality information. The example we have produced contains structured company records and fields for over 2 million IT and telecoms companies using data taken from their websites.

As social tagging grows increasingly popular on the Web, organizations are curious to see how this trendy Web 2.0 approach can benefit the business world. Social tagging allows users to employ their own language to organize and retrieve content, and encourages social collaboration between peers by making those tags visible to others. Organizations are thus looking to social tagging as a potential solution for increased findability on intranets, news/blog monitoring and collaboration in workgroups. The enterprise context is different however, and many of the elements that make social tagging work on the Web make it a challenge behind the firewall.

One of the many factors that led to the success of the Web was in how it defined links in a very simple manner, which encouraged cross-referencing. In the last two installments of this column, I’ve discussed the importance of the identifiers of the Web: URIs. The Web’s native document element, HTML, made it easy to connect one URI to another, and so relationships between documents could grow regardless of who controlled the documents. This of course meant that sometimes such links would break, signaled by the infamous 404 “Not Found” code.

I’m weighing in in favor of Web 3.0 as an alias for the Semantic Web. I know there are a lot of people who will roll their eyes and initiate some anti hype exorcism, but let’s have a sober look at the pluses and minuses here.