Semantic targeting: past, present and future

Keynote address day one of the ISKO UK 2009 biennale conference .

This keynote address looked at the evolution of the linguistic approach to content analysis which Crystal has been developing over the past twenty years. It begins with the knowledge management taxonomy used for the Cambridge family of general encyclopedias, and follows its transformation into an Internet taxonomy, with applications in automatic document classification, search engine assistance, e-commerce, online advertising, and
Internet security. Recent developments have brought a focus on advertising, a field which has seen ideas develop from simple keyword analysis to contextual advertising and now to semantic targeting.
David Crystal explores the difference between these notions, and describes current issues in the way semantic targeting is evolving, including ways of handling site sensitivity, sentiment, intention, and cultural localization.