Mondeca is a French software company based in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. The company name is derived from a place called Mont des Cats

Mont des Cats

Mont des Cats is a small hill near the town of Godewaersvelde, in French Flanders. Its name in Dutch is Katsberg.It is the seat of an abbey bearing the same name, famous for the cheese produced by the monks since 1890.- Origin of the name :...

, seat of a Cistercian abbey located in French Flanders

French Flanders

French Flanders is a part of the historical County of Flanders in present-day France. The region today lies in the modern-day region of Nord-Pas de Calais, the department of Nord, and roughly corresponds to the arrondissements of Lille, Douai and Dunkirk on the Belgian border.-Geography:French...

, also famous for its cheese production. The name is a cryptic reference to Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980, and the seventeenth person to occupy Seat 3.-Biography:Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie...

's universe, and to a region with a long tradition of publishing, learning and intellectual freedom.It has been financed by its founders as well as investment funds Trinova and Banque Populaire. The company currently has 23 employees

History

Mondeca was established in 2000, through private and investor funding, at the initiative of its founder and current CEO Jean Delahousse. The core technology was built in collaboration with a graph theory

Graph theory

In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs, mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects from a certain collection. A "graph" in this context refers to a collection of vertices or 'nodes' and a collection of edges that connect pairs of...

 team from the EHESS

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

The École des hautes études en sciences sociales is a leading French institution for research and higher education, a Grand Établissement. Its mission is research and research training in the social sciences, including the relationship these latter maintain with the natural and life sciences...

.
In the months following the foundation, Mondeca got involved in the standardization process of Topic Maps, both in ISO and OASIS

OASIS (organization)

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is a global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business and web service standards...

 working groups, and in the following years, in practical deployment of W3C Semantic Web

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...

 standards.
The company has been partner in several projects in the framework of European Research Area

European Research Area

The European Research Area is a system of scientific research programmes integrating the scientific resources of the European Union . Since its inception in 2000, the structure has been concentrated on multi-national co-operation in the fields of medical, environmental, industrial and...

, both in past Fifth Framework Programme (1998–2002) and ongoing Sixth Framework Programme (2002–2006), like current project TAO.
Mondeca has been in 2003 among the winners of the European IST Grand Prize

European IST Grand Prize

The European Information Society Technologies Prize is the most distinguished award for groundbreaking products that represent the best of European innovation in Information Society Technologies...

, awarding the most innovative enterprises in the field of information technology

Information technology

Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...

.

Product and Solutions

Through its software Intelligent Topic Manager , Mondeca offers an innovative approach using Ontology

Ontology (computer science)

In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.In theory, an ontology is...

, Semantics

Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....

 and Knowledge representation

Knowledge representation

Knowledge representation is an area of artificial intelligence research aimed at representing knowledge in symbols to facilitate inferencing from those knowledge elements, creating new elements of knowledge...

 in a single tool. The combination of these three dimensions makes it possible to federate the entire information and knowledge processing chain: indexing

Index (publishing)

An index is a list of words or phrases and associated pointers to where useful material relating to that heading can be found in a document...

, modelling, navigation and search, multi-channel diffusion.

Mondeca conducts extensive projects in a wide range of areas such as: Documentation

Documentation

Documentation is a term used in several different ways. Generally, documentation refers to the process of providing evidence.Modules of Documentation are Helpful...

 systems, Publishing

Publishing

Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information—the activity of making information available to the general public...

, Homeland security

Homeland security

Homeland security is an umbrella term for security efforts to protect states against terrorist activity. Specifically, is a concerted national effort to prevent terrorist attacks within the U.S., reduce America’s vulnerability to terrorism, and minimize the damage and recover from attacks that do...

, Knowledge base

Knowledge base

A knowledge base is a special kind of database for knowledge management. A Knowledge Base provides a means for information to be collected, organised, shared, searched and utilised.-Types:...

s, Competitive intelligence

Competitive intelligence

A broad definition of competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.Key...

, Customer support

Customer support

Customer support is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product....

 databases, Terminology

Terminology

Terminology is the study of terms and their use. Terms are words and compound words that in specific contexts are given specific meanings, meanings that may deviate from the meaning the same words have in other contexts and in everyday language. The discipline Terminology studies among other...

 and Metadata

Metadata

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

 repositories, and Taxonomy

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...

 management. Its technology can be completed by Text mining

Text mining

Text mining, sometimes alternately referred to as text data mining, roughly equivalent to text analytics, refers to the process of deriving high-quality information from text. High-quality information is typically derived through the devising of patterns and trends through means such as...

 components, such as those provided by its partner company Temis, or the open-source platform GATE

General Architecture for Text Engineering

General Architecture for Text Engineering or GATE is a Java suite of tools originally developed at the University of Sheffield beginning in 1995 and now used worldwide by a wide community of scientists, companies, teachers and students for all sorts of natural language processing tasks, including...

.

Mondeca solutions rely on open languages and standards, such as XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

, OWL

Web Ontology Language

The Web Ontology Language is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web...

, RDF

Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...

, SKOS

SKOS

Simple Knowledge Organization System is a family of formal languages designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary. SKOS is built upon RDF and RDFS, and its main objective is to enable...

 and Topic Maps.