Recently I chatted with SchemaLogic CEO Jeff Dirks about the companyÂ’s new spin in the marketplace. The software formerly known as "taxonomy management software" is now "BSM" software or "Business Semantics Management." Call it what you will, it's still about managing categories and vocabularies for your content, which we all could do a bit better.

SchemaLogic is using two banner clients, AP and Corbis, to rally around digital media and publishing as a key industry, specifically highlighting syndication as a business challenge that can be solved by better semantics management. I'd agree with that, but if the company youÂ’re syndicating content to doesn't follow the same standards or use the same vocabulary you do, all the software in the world wonÂ’t solve your syndication woes.

When I teach taxonomy seminars, I find that software buyers are confused by what IÂ’d call the "findability" software market, which encompasses text mining, autoclassification, taxonomy management, and enterprise search software. Different vendors fill different niches, while some attempt to cover all these bases.

SchemaLogic claims its differentiator is "the ability to build a common language to describe corporate information," which in turn helps technology like enterprise search work better. Still, it's not the software that builds the common language so much as help you manage it.

This is all changing, though, as social tagging takes off, and I suspect vendors like SchemaLogic stand to benefit. By allowing wider participatory tagging across enterprises, vocabulary management software can start to compile and reconcile, say, three different tags for the same content object, and each of the three people who tagged it can go back and find it using their own vocabulary. Here you need to focus on adoption and usability, given how much packaged content management applications lag behind web applications like flikr and delicious in terms of ease of use.

However, semantics are semantics, and the only way software will better understand and target information is through consistent standards and consensus around vocabulary. Or words. Tags. Categories? Call it what you will, just make sure the software calls it the same thing.