Well, at least that is the goal of the vendor’s latest incarnation of its semantic search engine, Cogito Answers. The technology is aimed at being a true semantic solution to addressing the challenges facing users -- both employees involved in enterprise search processes and customers trying to help themselves -- face in extracting the unstructured information they need via email, the web, and mobile devices.

“We apply the semantic engine to corporate information directly, so the system normalizes, integrates, and semantically extracts information from unstructured, where statistics say the vast majority of content or data resides,” says VP of Internet and Mobile Walter Kostiuk. “The second part is the natural language interface which is definitely a breakthrough in how you extract information easily -- it reduces the technology barrier of heavy applications and lets users interact with machines as they do with people. The same way you can e-mail a colleague you now can go through the web or wireless interface to communicate with a knowledge base.”

It’s a tool with applicability to Fortune 500 companies in general, and to telcos in particular. Carriers have a problem in that the new age of smart phones has some downsides to all the revenue pluses it delivers in terms of increased data usage -- that is, their complexity breeds customer service calls. Lots of them. The biggest cost of selling these phones for carriers, says Kostiuk, comes in terms of dealing with customer service issues, to the tune of about $6 to $10 per call processed.

Half of those calls are just about how to use the product or service, according to research Expert has done with carriers and a smart phone maker -- and that information is already provided in a user manual and already present in companies’ knowledge bases.

“So if a system existed where someone through common language could ask their questions through the web or a wireless interface, it would deflect that cost. The ROI is clear,” says Kostiuk. In a beta test Expert is currently conducting with a large smart phone device maker, Cogito Answers is handling tens of thousands of questions a day, he says.

See here for Page 2 of this article at SemanticWeb.com.