Making sense of the news

Applied Semantics has introduced News Series, an offering powered by its CIRCA technology. The company describes CIRCA as a proprietary semantic engine that employs an ontology, or database of millions of concepts and relationships between concepts, to read and assign meaning to any piece of unstructured content by building a profile of the key meanings residing on a page.

Built by a team of computational linguists and lexicographers, the ontology serves as a knowledgebase used by Applied Semantics products to make facilitate categorization, summarization and metatagging of news articles and many other forms of content.

Because the ontology covers millions of concepts, it is compatible with the wide range of news content handled by publishers, claims Applied Semantics. The company adds that News Series bundles content categorization, summarization and metatagging software with industry standard taxonomies such as IPTC and XML standards such as NewsML and PRISM. The result is reportedly a series of productivity application services that integrates into publishers’ existing editorial, wire, syndication library and archive systems.