Wilson says that in linguistics words are categorised around 16 broad categories. SYL has a drill-down function to define the desired use of the word. "If you were searching for the word 'bank', you would tell SYL whether you meant a financial institution or a slope. Automatically, the search results reflect this disambiguation -- thus they are more relevant and allow a user to narrow the search results.

Security is also important. The organisation's security model defines what the user has access to. "You'd be surprised how many organisations have implemented enterprise search, then yanked it two hours later when the CEO's emails become available to everyone," Wilson says.

Where an organisation has multiple branches, the software uses agents to harvest data and feed it back to the core system.

SYLSemantics is deployed as a virtual machine and can be installed and configured within hours.