The future of Semantic APIs

Business models based on in the cloud APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are undoubtedly an excellent choice for the commercialization of semantic technologies. In Daedalus we have been experimenting with these models for some time, both directly in the B2B market with some early adopters and indirectly, developing on top of our APIs our own products for the B2C market: Stilus (text proofreading) and Sentimentalytics (sentiment analysis).

What we have learned is that basic language functionality is hard to use for many developers who are not expert in these technologies, and that this fact requires them to build solutions through a process of trial and error in a do-it-yourself fashion, which is slow and inefficient. The market demands APIs with a more plug-and-play philosophy, which provide functionalities that are closer to the business, a faster learning curve and, as a result, increased productivity.

This is the reason why we have developed Textalytics, a new generation of semantic technologies in SaaS mode. As a provider, our idea is to deal with the technical details and provide developers with an offering that features high level functionality optimized for each application, process pipelines and linguistic resources preconfigured for various scenarios, SDKs and plug-ins that foster use and integration, and user communities to share good practices, among other features.

This was the content of our presentation at the recent API Days Mediterranea held in Madrid. You can access it here (recording of June 1, from minute 5:41:30) and the slides here.

Regarding Textalytics, we hope to give more details in the next LT-Innovate Summit 2013, to be held in Brussels (Belgium) on  June 26 and 27. Stay tuned.