Rearden Commerce ended a job search and hired Adam Pease as senior applied scientist.
And, Pease, in turn, will be heavily involved in search.
In a manner of speaking, you can think of Pease as a SUMO wrestler -- as in Suggested Upper Merged Ontology.
Rearden says Pease has spent the last decade creating SUMO, which the company describes as "the world's largest free, formal ontology."
In his new role, Pease will head up Rearden's "semantic technology and formal reasoning practices and technologies," the company says.
Pease says Rearden will use SUMO "to structure and describe the Rearden data by adding formal semantics."
The plan is to "move the company away from a mass of barely described database tables to a formal description of all data elements," Pease says. "The end result will be faster and more correct processing of data, with fewer integration and evolution headaches because there will be formal and computable understanding of what the data are, how they can be used, and whether they are consistent with new data to be integrated, or new proposed uses."
Rearden is best-known for its Rearden Personal Assistant, which is more than a corporate booking tool.
"Rearden Commerce represents an ideal opportunity to put SUMO into commercial practice, structuring data, improving decision-making and search, and ultimately having a real impact on how people interact with the Web, making it a more highly relevant experience," Pease says.
Pease founded Articulate Software in 2003 and worked there prior to his Rearden appointment.
Note: Rearden announced March 23 that it will sponsor the SUMO (Suggested Upper Merged Ontology) category of the Large Theory Division in the World Championship for Automated Theorem Proving in Warsaw, Poland, on Aug. 3, 2011.
It's a logical step for Rearden, which will underwrite the cash prizes in the SUMO category contest.
"Stimulating research and system development in logical reasoning is an essential aspect of furthering the community's work in semantic technology," Pease says.