Atanas Kiryakov: Bulgaria Offers Unique Combination for Software Start-Ups

Ontotext is a proof that Bulgaria is a great place for software start-ups, Atanas Kiryakov, the company's founder and chief executive officer, has said.

Kiryakov is one of the four Bulgarians selected in the New Europe 100 ranking - a list of 100 changemakers in Central and Eastern Europe selected by Warsaw-based journal Res Publica, Google, state-supported Visegrad Fund and the Financial Times. His brainchild, Ontotext, is a provider of semantic databases and content analytics to large media companies.

"This award is great recognition for the entire team of Ontotext. We invested over 400 person-years in R&D across Artificial Intelligence (AI), Semantic Web and database management," he has told Novinite when asked to comment on his achievement.

"Our Dynamic Semantic Publishing (DSP) platform is adopted by many of world's leading media and publishers - from media (like BBC) to newspapers (FT) and scientific publishers (Oxford University Press, Elsevier and others)."

The DSP platform combines data from multiple open data sources (e.g. Wikipedia and Geonames) with proprietary data into a big knowledge graph - billions of facts about millions of people, organizations, locations and other concepts. DSP loads this rich knowledge into GraphDB, a semantic graph database engine, and uses it to analyse text.

"This is the innovation - the information combined from all the these sources gives DSP context, the common sense knowledge that people have and computers do not. This allows us to make accurate analysis and to produce metadata tags with unmatched precision and richness. The benefit for the publishers is that they can better interlink, classify, recommend and combine their content into new products, channels and feeds. And to provide...