Gruff v5 and AllegroGraph Power Graph Search for Banking, Pharma Discovery, Health Care and Security Applications

OAKLAND, Calif. — April 23, 2013 – Franz Inc., the leading supplier of Graph Database technology for the Semantic Web, today announced Gruff v5.0, the industry’s leading RDF browser to view graph data, explore connections within data, and visually build queries without writing code.

The free-form nature of Graph style data offers a lot of flexibility for connecting data, but that freedom can also make it more challenging to find interesting patterns or simply navigate through your data. It has become typical for RDF data sets to contain thousands of classes and relationship types, making it hard to even formulate the analytics and queries you want to perform.

Gruff, a visual analytics and discovery tool, was developed by Franz to specifically address these Graph data challenges in large data sets. Gruff lets you intelligently explore graphs in multiple views:

• Graphical View – See the shape and density of your graph data
• Tabular view – Understand objects as a whole
• Outline view – Explore the often hierarchical nature of graphs
• Query view – Write Prolog or SPARQL queries
• Graphical Query Builder – Create queries visually via drag and drop

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The 2013 International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is coming to Sydney, Australia’s biggest city, October 21- 25 2013.  “The weather should be warming up beautifully for spring,” says  local chair Kerry Taylor, “and I’d like to promise you sunny days and sparkling views. The first two days, Monday and Tuesday will be held at the Sydney Masonic Centre, an architecturally-significant  ‘new brutalist’  building in the southern CBD. Wednesday to Friday will be held at the Sydney Conference and Exhibition Centre, in the tourist precinct of  Darling Harbour, with views over the water and the city.  Summer Daylight Saving will have begun, so you can enjoy the evenings too after each day of intense  scientific exchange.”

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[Editor's Note: This guest post is from Antonia Bradford, who attended "ICT Days" in Trento Italy, and offered this report.]

Trento, Italy, hosted a technology conference ‘ICT Days 2013’ between 20th and 23rd March. Like all such events it was interesting, dynamic and informative, but it was also quite different from the normal conferences.

It broadcast a very loud message that Semantic Technology, Big Data, and the interconnectivity of things will – without any doubt – affect everything and everyone; that these technologies will change the way everyone interacts with public services, the way in which dwindling natural resources are distributed and managed, the way citizens interact with each other, the way in which public and private bodies cooperate to support the needs of the citizen and the way in which public bodies are monitored and held accountable to the people that elected them.

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What could you build if the entire web was your database?

A hackathon has been added to the agenda of the Semantic Technology & Business Conference. Semantic Hack, organized by SemanticWeb.com and Diffbot, will be an opportunity for developers and designers to work with RDF, SPARQL, OWL, entity extraction, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, newly available datasets, and other semantic technologies that help make the web more readable, accessible and dynamic for humans and more interpretable by machines. Semantic Hack is free to attend and prior experience with semantics is NOT required to participate.

Registration is open, but space is limited. Hackathon organizers are currently seeking coaches and sponsors; those interested in either role should contact the organizers.

• Who: Developers, designers, and others interested in semantic technology
• What: A day-long hackathon to build applications that help further expand the semantic web, or demonstrate the power of accessible web data
• Where: Hilton San Francisco Union Square
• When: Saturday, June 1, 2013, 9am – 9pm

Current sponsors include Bosatsu Consulting, The National Center for Biomedical Ontology, Protégé, and Stardog.

http://SemanticHack.eventbrite.com

The preliminary program for the upcoming Semantic Technology & Business Conference (June, 2-5, 2013 in San Francisco) was announced yesterday. Today, we are pleased to add that the second annual “Top Semantic Start-Up Competition” is open for submissions! The contest will take place at the conference venue, the Hilton Union Square in San Francisco, on Monday, June 3, 2013. Start-ups who wish to compete should visit http://semtechbizsf2013.semanticweb.com/start-up-comp.cfm for further details.

“It is a very exciting time for start-ups in the Semantic Technology sector. With organizations like Gartner taking note of the importance of these technologies, and companies of all sizes wanting to glean insight from increasingly available data sources, investors and customers are paying attention. Last year, the judges had a difficult time deciding which company would win the prize. This year, we expect that decision will be even harder,” said contest moderator, our own Eric Franzon.

There will be two phases to the contest. In phase one, companies enter a profile of their start-up in an online form (keep reading for details), and ten finalist companies will be selected to present their pitches in person at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference. In phase 2, those ten companies will each deliver a pitch in front of a panel of judges with experience in entrepreneurship and investment. A single company will be selected as the winner. Prizes will be awarded at the completion of each phase.

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