Luxid: Positioning Adjustments
September 23, 2014
Luxid, based in Paris, offers an automatic indexing service. The company has focused on the publishing sector as well a number of other verticals. The company uses the phrase “semantic content enrichment” to describe the companies indexing. The more trendy phrase is “metatagging,” but I prefer the older term.
The company also uses the term “ontology” along with references to semantic jargon like “triples.” The idea is that a licensee can select a module that matches an industry sector. WAND, a competitor, offers a taxonomy library. The idea is that much of the expensive and intellectually demand work needed to build a controlled vocabulary from scratch is sidestepped.
The positioning that I find interesting is that Luxid delivers “NLP enabled ontology management workflow.” The idea is that once the indexing system is installed, the licensee can maintain the taxonomy using the provided interface. This is another way of saying that administrative tools are included. Another competitor, Smartlogic, uses equally broad and somewhat esoteric terms to describe what are essential indexing operations.
Like other search and content processing vendors, Luxid invokes the magic of Big Data. Luxid asserts, “Streamlined, Big Data architecture offers improved scalability and robust integration options.” The point that indexing processes often stub toes is the amount of human effort and machine processing time required to keep and index updated and populate the new content across already compiled indexes. Scalability can be addressed with more resources. More resources often means increased costs, a challenge for any indexing system that deals with regular content, not just Big Data.
Will the revised positioning generate more inquiries and sales leads? Possibly. I find the wordsmithing content processing vendors use fascinating. The technology, despite the academic jargon, has been around since the days of Data Harmony and other aging methods.
The key points, in my view, is that Luxid offers a story that makes sense. The catnip may be the jargon, the push into publishing which is loath to spend for humans to create indexes, and the packaging of vocabularies into “Skill Cartridges.”
I anticipate that some of Luxid’s competitors will emulate the Luxid terminology. For many years, much of the confusion about which content processing does what can be traced to widespread use of jargon.
Stephen E Arnold, September 22, 2014
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