To address that quandary, Lexalytics sells its semantic platform primarily to service provider partners, who then fine-tune it for specific business domains and applications. Thomson Reuters' Machine Readable News service is one example.

Other platform vendors have been rolling out business-specific solutions. Endeca, for example, provides for e-business and enterprise semantic applications, including specific offerings for e-commerce and e-publishing.

There are also tools to automatically incorporate semantic metadata, and W3C standards, into existing bodies of information. For example, automatically transforms both structured and unstructured data to RDF, according to Lang. It then presents, or "advertises," the information on the Web as a SPARQL endpoint that can be accessed by SPARQL-compliant browsers, he adds.

An open-source tool called can map selected database content to RDF and OWL ontologies, making the data accessible to SPARQL-compliant applications.

Revelytix sells a W3C-compliant knowledge-modeling tool called , a wiki-based framework designed to help everyone from technical specialists and subject matter experts to business users collaboratively develop a semantic vocabulary that describes and maps domain-specific information residing on multiple Web sites. Communities of interest can then use Knoodl.com to access, share and refine that knowledge, according to Lang.