Mondeca: A Semantic Technology Company
April 25, 2008
Twice in the last two days I’ve been asked about Mondeca, based in Paris. If you are not familiar with the company, it has been involved in semantic content processing for almost a decade. The company describes itself in this way:
Mondeca provides software solutions that leverage semantics to help organizations obtain maximum return from their accumulated knowledge, content and software applications. Its solutions are used by publishing, media, industry, tourism, sustainable development and government customers worldwide.
The company made a splash in professional publishing with its work for some of the largest scientific, technical, legal, and business publishers. Its customers include Novartis, the Thomson Corporation, LexisNexis, and Strabon.
Mondeca makes a goodly amount of information available on its Web site. You can learn more about the company’s technology, solutions, and management team by working through the links on the Web site.
Indexing by the Book: Automatic Functions Plus Human Interaction
Semantic technology or semantic content analysis can carry different freights of meaning. My understanding is that Mondeca has been a purist when it comes to observing standards, enforcing the rules for well-formed taxonomies, and assembling internally consistent and user friendly controlled term lists. If you are not familiar with the specifics of a rigorous approach to controlled terms and taxonomies, take a look at this screech of Bodega’s subject matter expert interface. Be aware that I pulled this from my files, so the interface shipping today may differ from this approach. The principal features and functions will remain behind the digital drapery, however.My recollection is that this is the interface used by Wolters Kluwer for some of its legal content.
What is obvious to me is that Mondeca and a handful of other companies involved in semantic technology take an “old school” approach with no short cuts. Alas, some of the more jejune pundits in the controlled vocabulary and taxonomy game can sometimes be more relaxed. Without training in the fine art of thesauri, a quick glance makes it difficult for an observer to see the logical problems and inconsistencies in a thesaurus or taxonomy. However, after the user runs some queries that deliver more chaff than wheat, the quick-and-dirty approach is like one of those sugar-free and fat-free cookies. There’s just not enough substance to satisfy the user’s information craving.
Mondeca has at times worked closely with other companies to deliver a womb-to-tomb solution for data management, semantic content processing, search, and text mining. You may be familiar with Temis, a company that has gained some traction in the drug and pharmaceutical sector. Mondeca has also worked with Antidot, a vendor of search and retrieval technology. This triumvirate has achieved some solid wins in Europe, but to my knowledge Mondeca and Antidot have a much lower profile in the US. Temis, on the other hand, has made headway at Pfizer and a number of other US outfits.
- More information about Antidot is here. (If you sign up for white papers or other goodies, you will have to use a “real email”. The company will not respond to Google, Hotmail, or Yahoo email addresses. I have all three and found this restriction delightfully French.)
- More information about Temis is here.
Key Point about Mondeca
One of the most interesting aspects of Mondeca to me is that it offers a systematic way to tackle the controlled vocabulary and taxonomy chores many organizations are now doing. Manual tools and informal processes just don’t work very well. Mondeca can provide a system, plus consulting and engineering support. The diagram below shows a representative snapshot of the core of the Mondeca approach. Again, this diagram comes from my files, so some of the details are almost certain to have changed in the last nine to 12 months. I think it is useful for getting a sense of the Mondeca architecture’s components.
Please, note that you can integrate the Mondeca system with your current content transformation engine and your enterprise search system.
Mondeca is worth a close look if you want to add semantic horsepower to your existing search and content processing system.
Stephen Arnold, April 25, 2008
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