Data Essence intros Web app for institutional investors

Data Essence of Haifa, Israel, Tuesday at DEMOfall 08 demonstrated a beta version of its first semantic Web powered application designed to help institutional investors find information buried deep in obscure Websites. The company plans to initiate beta testing of its software-as-as-service application with 10 investment funds within the next few months

The eight-person start-up is one of six companies demonstrating their latest products at DEMOfall 08 this week under

the sponsorship of market researcher IDC and the Israeli Venture Association. The Israeli delegation - Tufin Technologies, Arx, Data Essence, Ethos Networks, mPortico, and Sentrigo - are expanding sales efforts in the U.S., and some are looking for additional venture capital investment.

Amnon Mishor, Data Essence's co-founder and CEO, said "We're digging deep into long-tail content using intelligent agents to find unique,personal information to help institutional investors investigate companies."

The agent creates an information stream to match an investor's investment strategy, time horizon, current positions,

and other parameters.

Mishor said Data Essence is not in competition with search vendors like Google, Cuil and Yahoo!, nor with semantic search engines like Hakia and Powerset, which was recently acquired by Microsoft, because those companies mainly focus on consumers. Data Essence provides real time coverage of selected Web sources, and doesn't search the entire Web.

"We see the huge benefits that can come out of the semantic web vision,and we have no doubt that more and more semantically annotated content will become available like freebase, DBpedia, and twine," Mosher said."However, we think that there is no need to wait until the data Webvision will come to reality. Also today it is possible to provide intelligent, Web-based, information services that interact with users through meaningful concepts rather than through meaningless keywords,and to constantly provide information which truly matches the users'interest. This goal can be achieved by applying state of the art natural language processing and text engineering techniques in order to automatically generate clever semantic indexing."

He believes there's still long way to go until semantic Web technologies can be efficiently applied on the entire Web. Because of the semantic Web is in its infancy, Mishor expects other vendors to apply semantic Web technology to specific knowledge domains.

"Clever semantic tagging cannot stand for itself," Mosher said. "There is a need for sophisticated algorithms that utilize the semantic data to intelligently hand pick information tailored to match the users'interests and profile. Without this ability, any natural language solution or semantic database will become a not so useful utility, and will not really solve the problem of information overflow."

Misher and Yaron Karasik, co-founder and chief technology officer, both have a decade of experience developing methods for information gathering and processing for the Israeli Defense Forces intelligence.

Since Israel became a country 60 years ago, the Israeli Defense Forces has been the largest contributor to developing digital technology by spending billions of dollars on research and development and training soldiers in their early twenties to manage expensive, complex computing projects, said Asaf Lev, director of business development for IDC Israel.

"The Israeli army has no official intellectual property policy, and that enables many soldiers who complete their military duty to start up their own company, using the knowledge and methods they acquired in the army," Lev said. "In the Israeli delegation to DEMOfall 08 you will be able to find some good examples of military-trained entrepreneurs."

Mishor said the company has received US$1 million in seed investment and is seeking Series A venture funding.