Draft:Semantic Visions

Semantic Visions is a Czech company, providing risk monitoring services since 2011. Using semantic analysis, it continuously analyses the new content of several thousand Internet websites in 12 world languages. According to its own presentation, the company is able to cover 90 per cent of the global web news in real-time.

It analyses data from more than 1.1 million articles in 12 languages daily ​​and detects events in them, relating to specific activities, events, or companies, and can track trends and context in them. Its customers mainly include multinational corporations, ensuring the stability of their supply chains; the other activities of Semantic Visions include fighting against disinformation websites. One of the methods used for analysis is the so-called big data.

Past and Present
Newstin, the predecessor of today's Semantic Visions, was founded by data analyst František Vrabel; after successfully developing a new analytical technology and unsuccessfully attempting to conclude a contract with Intel, the company was impacted by the global financial crisis after 2008 and went bankrupt due to unpaid loans.

The company's activities were then resumed in 2011, thanks to the capital of Internet entrepreneur Jan Balatka and it later established cooperation, among others, with the software giant SAP. It also began to focus on exposing disinformation (especially combating Russian propaganda ); after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, it collaborated with the Czech Ministry of Health.

As of January 2020, Semantic Visions had three billion web articles in its database and was able to analyse 100 terabytes of data in 12 languages, including major East Asian languages ​​(Chinese,Japanese, Korean). At the time, it employed 30 people, and its annual turnover was less than 100 million Czech korunas.

In 2022, František Vrabel left the management of the company, and Jan Balatka took over the position of CEO. In addition to him, the former managing partner of Deloitte in the country Diana Rádl Rogerová, also a partner in the investment fund Behind Inventions, came on board. The investment group Pale Fire Capital is Semantic Visions' majority shareholder.

Semantic Visions monitors over 220,000 unique web domains, comprising approximately 900,000 resources. The company collects and analyses more than 1.1 million news articles daily from various online global media outlets in 12 languages. The process involves automated resource discovery, classification, evaluation, and assessment of the suitability and viability of each resource.

The company toolset include natural language processing (NLP) for text interpretation. Similar to human reading, it understands elements such as events, entities, themes, sentiments, and motifs. Semantic Visions also employs a proprietary artificial intelligence that can match companies or entities with associated positive or negative events and examines various signals to determine the relevance of each connection. The ontology team tackles issues such as word meaning disambiguation, i.e. resolving the meaning of ambiguous words based on their context, as well as sentiment analysis, which determines the mood expressed in a piece of text, as stated on the company's website in a published interview with the Ontology Department Head Anna Polverari.