Taxonomy Turmoil: Good Enough May Be Too Much
February 28, 2015
For years, I have posted a public indexing Overflight. You can examine the selected outputs at this Overflight link. (My non public system is more robust, but the public service is a useful temperature gauge for a slice of the content processing sector.)
When it comes to indexing, most vendors provide keyword, concept tagging, and entity extraction. But are these tags spot on? No, most are good enough.
A happy quack to Jackson Taylor for this “good enough” cartoon. The salesman makes it clear that good enough is indeed good enough in today’s marketing enabled world.
I chose about 50 companies that asserted their systems performed some type of indexing or taxonomy function. I learned that the taxonomy business is “about to explode.” I find that to be either an interesting investment tip or a statement that is characteristic of content processing optimists.
Like search and retrieval, plugging in “concepts” or other index terms is a utility function. For example, if one indexes each word in an article appearing in this blog, the article might be about another subject. For example, in this post, I am talking about Overflight, but the real topic is the broader use of metadata in information retrieval systems. I could assign the term “faceted navigation” to this article as a way to mark this article as germane to point and click navigation systems.
If you examine the “reports” Overflight outputs for each of the companies, you will discover several interesting things as I did on February 28, 2015 when I assembled this short article.
- Mergers or buying failed vendors at fire sale prices are taking places. Examples include Lucidea’s purchase of Cuadra and InMagic. Both of these firms are anchored in traditional indexing methods and seemed to be within a revenue envelope until their sell out. Business Objects acquired Inxight and then SAP acquired Business Objects. Bouvet acquired Ontopia. Teradata acquired Revelytix
- Moving indexing into open source. Thomson Reuters acquired ClearForest and made most of the technology available as OpenCalais. OpenText, a rollup outfit, acquired Nstein. SAS acquired Teragram. Smartlogic acquired Schemalogic. (A free report about Schemalogic is available at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles.)
- A number of companies just failed, shut down, or went quiet. These include Active Classification, Arikus, Arity, Forth ICA, MaxThink, Millennium Engineering, Navigo, Progris, Protege, punkt.net, Questans, Quiver, Reuse Company, Sandpiper,
- The indexing sector includes a number of companies my non public system monitors; for example, the little known Data Harmony with six figure revenues after decades of selling really hard to traditional publishers. Conclusion: Indexing is a tough business to keep afloat.
There are numerous vendors who assert their systems perform indexing, entity, and metadata extraction. More than 18 of these companies are profiled in CyberOSINT, my new monograph. Oracle owns Triple Hop, RightNow, and Endeca. Each of these acquired companies performs indexing and metadata operations. Even the mashed potatoes search solution from Microsoft includes indexing tools. The proprietary XML data management vendor MarkLogic asserts that it performs indexing operations on content stored in its repository. Conclusion: More cyber oriented firms are likely to capture the juicy deals.
So what’s going on in the world of taxonomies? Several observations strike me as warranted:
First, none of the taxonomy vendors are huge outfits. I suppose one could argue that IBM’s Lucene based system is a billion dollar baby, but that’s marketing peyote, not reality. Perhaps MarkLogic which is struggling toward $100 million in revenue is the largest of this group. But the majority of the companies in the indexing business are small. Think in terms of a few hundred thousand in annual revenue to $10 million with generous accounting assumptions.
What’s clear to me is that indexing, like search, is a utility function. If a good enough search system delivers good enough indexing, then why spend for humans to slog through the content and make human judgments. Why not let Google funded Recorded Future identify entities, assign geo codes, and extract meaningful signals? Why not rely on Haystax or RedOwl or any one of more agile firms to deliver higher value operations.
I would assert that taxonomies and indexing are important to those who desire the accuracy of a human indexed system. This assumes that the humans are subject matter specialists, the humans are not fatigued, and the humans can keep pace with the flow of changed and new content.
The reality is that companies focused on delivering old school solutions to today’s problems are likely to lose contracts to companies that deliver what the customer perceives as a higher value content processing solution.
What can a taxonomy company do to ignite its engines of growth? Based on the research we performed for CyberOSINT, the future belongs to those who embrace automated collection, analysis, and output methods. Users may, if the user so chooses, provide guidance to the system. But the days of yore, when monks with varying degrees of accuracy created catalog sheets for the scriptoria have been washed to the margin of the data stream by today’s content flows.
What’s this mean for the folks who continue to pump money into taxonomy centric companies? Unless the cyber OSINT drum beat is heeded, the failure rate of the Overflight sample is a wake up call.
Buying Apple bonds might be a more prudent financial choice. On the other hand, there is an opportunity for taxonomy executives to become “experts” in content processing.
Stephen E Arnold, February 28, 2015
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