Semanta was founded by IT professionals who used to work for Oracle, Cognos or SAS and felt that big BI platforms are lacking readibility and user friendliness. That is why Semanta always puts the user first. We want people to use our tools with ease. We design solutions delivering comprehensibility into your existing IT systems.
How was it at the beginning
Quite hard We focus on different ways to use a knowledge base, which remains quite an unexplored field today. We all are inspired by Wikipedia, the largest knowledge base in the world, everybody wants something similar inside their company to store their business know-how. However, the art of building knowledge bases in an enterprise environment is an emerging one.
Lessons learned:
MS-Office into knowledge base: Everybody works with office aplications - in order for the company to use a knowledge base, we have to organize a way to import Words and Excels into it. It is important that people can open Word and Excel files directly in the kb environment without having to download them first ... and after people do their changes in the document it is a necessary that files can be uploaded into the knowledge base directly from MS Word and Excel without the need of saving it in between.
Knowledge base must have content when handed over to a client: In each company there is a lot of documents people need for their everyday work. If we omit to transfer at least part of these documents into the knowledge base (when not all of them), the base will not come into operation. Everybody will go on to use the shared disk, knowledge base will remain empty. Content transfer is therefore an inherent part of the project.
Our experience with business dictionaries
We use the knowledge base as a tool for building business dictionaries. These dictionaries help people to understand terms the company uses in its reports, report users then do not have to burden report authors with ever repeating explanation requests. An excellent idea so far, but ...
... first experience from large companies was a bit tough, since
Politics and more definitions to 1 term: term definitions in bigger companies present a political issue (ex. term "customer" is understood differently by the marketing department than the finance department, they both will never agree to a common definition) - thus, the dictionary must enable a term to have more meanings and has to keep context with every meaning.
Discussion generated definitions of term: discussing meaning of terms can be quite time consuming. The project can be marked successful when the dictionary is filled with tens of most important draft definitions and employees keep discussing them. Discussion takes place in a written form right below the very term definition in the knowledge base. This way the company develops terms which are not artificial and people want to use them.
Where are we heading now
Semanta focuses on knowledge bases in the enterprise environment.
User perspective
We have designed a solution for companies having a distribution net. With the help of knowledge base they can uniformly communicate with customers across all distribution channels and collect feedback
We have integrated our business dictionary into the Web 2.0 environment of knowledge bases. Thanks to the Web 2.0 nature people can discuss terms and dictionary stays alive and up-to-date
Technological perspective
Semanta defaultly operates on J2EE platform, InteliJ Idea became the company's standard
Besides J2EE we are increasingly dealing with XML technologies, especially XML database eXist. We consider it a suitable core of our metadata solutions. On the other hand the disbelief of some of our customners in XML db leads us to rigorous SQL alternatives implementation
Semanta cloud
Semanta has been using the cloud-computing environment on Amazon Web Services for over a year now. Thanks to this infrastructure we are able to run tests on various operation systems and database servers and not lose tim e with their constant reinstallations and maintanance.
We focus on different ways to use a knowledge base, which remains quite an unexplored field today. We all are inspired by Wikipedia, the largest knowledge base in the world, everybody wants something similar inside their company to store their business know-how. However, the art of building knowledge bases in an enterprise environment is an emerging one.
