"We're also talking to several multinationals which are interested in our technology," he says.

SYL has signed up three government departments so far, but Wilson says he is not allowed to name them at this stage. That's not bad going for a company which was launched less than a year ago.

Around 90 percent of all data was created in the past two years, and it's estimated that users spend up to 25 percent of their time searching for the appropriate document. Hence the term Big Data.

Semantic search improves search accuracy by understanding the contextural meaning of terms. The goal is to deliver quickly the information sought, rather than the user having to search through a long list of loosely related keyword results.

The concept is not new. There are several semantic search engines, all with varying degrees of focus and success, according to technical reviewers.