A One-Stop-Shop for Text Analytics and Semantics

If your business needs text analysis, semantic technology or general language processing the advantages of a GATE-based solution include:

Comprehensiveness.
The set of tools we offer is as close to a soup-to-nuts offering as anyone has put together in one package. That we can provide some many pieces of the puzzle without sacrificing quality is a serious bonus. Our GATE Process brings all the tools and protocols together into a recipe for successful and sustainable deployment.

Scaleability.
The RDF and OWL backbones provided by Ontotext, plus cloud processing, the sheer hardware power of Matrixware, and the vast array of plug-ins from GATE combine to offer serious scale to our clients.

Openness, extensibility and reusability.
Computer scientists love standards, which is why we have so many contradictory ones. The standards that really matter are de facto, and, with hundreds of thousands of users over more than a decade, GATE's annotation model is as close to a defacto standard as anything in the field. But the key thing is that our data and processing is open (open source, documented, maintained), extensible (with well-defined APIs and web service endpoints) and reusable (our code is present in more applications than any similar system). Combine this picture with our work in ISO standards (TC37), Ontotext's standard semantic repositories (OWL and RDFS) and query UIs and the ease of use for 3rd-party applications and processes is unparalleled.

Transparency.
We've spent a great deal of effort deconstructing the black box semantic platform. Aside from the benefits of open source, the fact that the system has numerous plug and play components and users can see where the rule sets or the ontology or the algorithms fit, they have a much better insight into how the system works (and how it doesn't!). This expresses not only realism about the state of the state-of-the-art, but also confidence that the system can retain its value even without lipstick.

Robustness.
Unlike most research software our systems are engineered for production. Our Information Extraction (IE - aka semantic annotation) software is quality-controlled by the rigorous application of quantitative evaluation metrics (built-in to the GATE Developer environment) which ensure that the behaviour of our systems is predictable. Sheffield and partners have applied IE in very many domains, and developed world-leading expertise in producing robust systems for diverse applications.

Sustainable efficiency.
As we extend comprehensiveness, scalability, reusabilty, transparency and robustness beyond what other ecosystems offer, and as we provide many points of entry into the solution set--including points where additional services are possible (e.g., geographically distributed manual annotation, hosted solutions, integration), what we're offering is the only text engineering solution that is focused on sustainable efficiency. So it's not about tool XYZ, but about a philosophy that invites clients to invest in a long term strategy that will pay dividends over the long-term (and also require minimal upfront investment).