Companies that lack the internal resources to build their own semantic Web infrastructure can follow Alpha Equity's lead and go with a semantic service provided by a third party.

One such provider is Thomson Reuters, which, in addition to its Machine Readable News service, offers a service called through which it creates semantic metadata for customers' submitted content. Customers can deploy that tagged content for search, news aggregation, blogs, catalogs and other applications, according to Thomas Tague, a vice president at Thomson Reuters.

OpenCalais also includes a free toolkit that customers can use to create their own semantic infrastructures and metadata, and to set up links to other Web providers. The service now processes more than 5 million documents per day, according to Tague.

DNA13 (now part of the ), (now the owner of Scout Labs) and Cymfony are among the semantic service providers that query, collect and analyze Web-based news and social media, with an eye toward helping customers in areas such as brand and reputation management, customer relationship management and marketing.