Semantic technology provider SmartLogic has acquired competitor SchemaLogic, adding multiple new Fortune 1000 enterprise clients to its customer list and adding SchemaLogic’s family of products to its application portfolio.

More Content Intelligence

Organizations are acquiring increasing volumes of content,  making it difficult to gain value from it even when leveraging tools such as  content management systems and enterprise search. Semantic technology offers the promise of being able to leverage computers to interpret the information, derive relationships and make it useful with less effort than necessary for a human to review it.

As information volumes and interest in semantic technology grows, so does the content intelligence market. Today, however, the market contracted slightly with  SmartLogic’s acquisition of competitor  SchemaLogic. Both companies provide tools that complement enterprise search, content management and business intelligence solutions by   tagging, enhancing metadata and classifying content so organizations can better find, organize, process and control their information assets.

The acquisition of SchemaLogic will expand SmartLogic’s expertise in the pharmaceutical and life science verticals and cement the company’s existing strength in the media, financial services, healthcare and research markets. SmartLogic will also be able to expand its application portfolio with new features and offerings from SchemaLogic’s product suite.

SmartLogic’s core product is its Semaphore Enterprise Semantic Platform that includes:

  • Ontology manager -- allows users to define and manage the full lifecycle of semantic taxonomies and vocabularies
  • Classification and text mining server -- a natural language processing engine that processes text to extract metadata and apply classification to the content
  • Semantic enhancement server -- provides a graphical interface that allows developers to query ontology or taxonomy in real-time
  • Search application framework -- a packaged interface that implements search best practices to leverage with enterprise search platforms such as Google Search Appliance and Apache Solr

In addition, the company offers a number of pre-built integrations with products such as Microsoft SharePoint. The capabilities of Semaphore will be complemented by SchemaLogic’s MetaPoint, which provides similar capabilities.

Terms of the Deal

The companies have not disclosed terms of the deal, timeline or how the teams will be combined. The deal may be a sign that the relatively young semantic technology market is about to undergo some maturation. It would not be surprising to see other companies combining in the near future to secure their competitive positions.