A monthly subscription to the service isn't cheap, Fioramonti says. According to one estimate -- which Thomson Reuters would not comment on -- the cost of real-time data updates is between $15,000 and $50,000 per month. But Fioramonti says the service's value more than justifies the price Alpha Equity pays for it. He says the information has helped boost the performance of the firm's portfolio and it has enabled Alpha Equity to get a jump on competitors. "Thomson Reuters gives us the news and the analysis, so we can continue to grow as a quantitative practitioner," he says.

Alpha Equity's experience is hardly unique. Whether a business decides to build in-house or hire a service provider, it often pays a hefty price to fully exploit technology. This is particularly true if the information being searched and analyzed contains jargon, concepts and acronyms that are specific to a particular business domain.

Here's an overview of what's available to help businesses deploy and exploit semantic Web infrastructures, along with a look at what's still needed for the technology to achieve its potential.

At the core of of a semantic Web is federated search. This would enable a search engine, automated agent or application to query hundreds or thousands of information sources on the Web, discover and semantically analyze relevant content, and retrieve exactly the product, answer or information the user was seeking.