Synaptica

Synaptica, established in 1995 by Dave Clarke and Trish Yancey, operates in the enterprise software market with a focus on taxonomy and ontology management. The company provides solutions that help organizations control their enterprise knowledge and metadata. Clarke, with a background in library and information science, co-founded the company to address the growing need for structured data management, a vision he has continued to pursue as CEO.

The firm's core business revolves around its suite of software products designed for knowledge organization. These tools enable clients to create, manage, and deploy various knowledge organization systems, including taxonomies, thesauri, and ontologies. Synaptica serves a diverse client base, ranging from large corporations and government agencies to cultural institutions, all of which require a robust framework for managing vast amounts of information. Its business model is centered on software licensing, maintenance, and providing professional services for implementation and consulting.

The primary offering is the Graphite software platform, a system for building and managing controlled vocabularies. This platform allows users to construct and visualize complex semantic relationships within their data, thereby improving information discovery and retrieval. A key feature of Graphite is its adherence to industry standards such as SKOS and RDF, ensuring interoperability with other data systems. This capability allows for the integration of structured metadata across different enterprise applications, which helps in breaking down information silos. The software also includes text analysis and auto-tagging functionalities, which automate the process of categorizing large volumes of content, enhancing efficiency for its clients.

Keywords: taxonomy management, ontology software, knowledge organization, metadata management, semantic technology, enterprise software, controlled vocabularies, text analytics, knowledge graph, SKOS