Thomson CTO says semantic enhancement through good metadata is the future

It's interesting to see the business perspective on the value of good metadata.

Thomson's chief technology officer [Michael Wilens], an MIT-educated engineer ... spends most of his time manning servers that handle almost as much data as Google Inc. or Yahoo Inc. on a daily basis

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Mr. Wilens isn't merely concerned with the next three months: He is looking ahead to the next 10 years, to the intense technological race he expects to unfold between Thomson and rivals such as Bloomberg.

The competition for high-end financial, legal and scientific data is just getting started, he argues.

The coming decade will see extensive amounts of time and money invested by companies like Thomson and Bloomberg to develop artificial intelligence capable of crunching the vast amounts of information circulating throughout the world each day.

It will be used to develop what Mr. Wilens calls “meta-data,” or the ability for computers to create “smarter” information from existing data.

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“The war of the future, in all information services and on the Internet, is going to be fought around data, about data,” Mr. Wilens said last week. “The ability to build products quickly and get them into the market faster than competitors is really critical.”

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“All we need to do, though, is put additional data fields on those news articles [or company statements] that say this was a positive article, this was a negative article, or this was the specific individual that said it. All of a sudden you can build analytics against it.”

Globe and Mail - Thomson's challenge: Make data smarter - October 9, 2007