12/11/2007

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Siderean Software takes its name from the word sidereal, as in sidereal navigation. For you non-sailors, sidereal navigation is the practice of ancient mariners making their way across the central Pacific, navigating using the stars as a compass along with seamarks and signs such as bird and marine migrations.

The company's product, Seamark Navigator, takes its inspiration from this, aiming to offer users a precise way to navigate the digital realm, enabling them to begin searches before they know exactly what they are looking for.

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"Search is great when you know what you want to ask for and can articulate that in a way that you can type in, but it leaves people hanging when they don't know what to type into the text box," says Bradley Allen, founder and CTO. "To make effective progress against a huge volume of information you need navigation tools."

Siderean is focused on taking the wealth of metadata that is out there and generating that navigational context in a way that is sensitive to what the user is asking for and where they have been, and then providing a high level view of potential destinations. "That's the essence of navigation, getting from point a to point b when you don't know how, and then sharing that information with others," Allen says.

Since the early part of this decade, the start-up has been engaged in discovering what the real opportunity is in terms of being able to build a large and scalable company that can exploit semantics to make information more accessible and discovery more viable. It's coming, it seems, in the form of synthesizing semantic web principles with the social nature of Web 2.0 applications, and giving people the ability to bind information together from these and other sources via a consistent, unified information architecture based on RDF, providing a way for traditional media companies or enterprises to create vertical information hubs that may cater to general consumers or customers, partners, internal employees, or any other community of interest.

Siderean sees in its customer base -- which includes enterprises, publishers, and the library and academic space -- tremendous use of the kinds of applications that people are using on the consumer Internet, such as Facebook for social interactions, wikis to document information and collaboration in workgroups, and blogs as information resources to keep up on data that is relevant to specific interests. The result of this is that so much of today's content is being generated by end users collaborating with other end users directly, and the world is moving away from distinguishing between data and content to a point where everything is, in essence, metadata.

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