Photo courtesy: Flickr/rvaphotodude

Last month at its MarkLogic World 2013 conference, the enterprise NoSQL database platform provider talked semantics as it related to its MarkLogic Server technology that ingests, manages and searches structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data (see our story here). The vendor late last week was scheduled to provide an early access release of MarkLogic 7, formally due by year’s end, to some dozens of initial users.

“People see a convergence of search and semantics,” Stephen Buxton, Director, Product Management, recently told The Semantic Web Blog. To that end, a lot of the vendor’s customers have deployed MarkLogic technology as well as specialized triple stores, but what they really want, he says, is an integrated approach, “a single database that does both individually and both together,” he says. “We see the future of search as semantics and the future of semantics as search, and they are very much converging.” At its recent conference, Buxton says the company demonstrated a MarkLogic app it built to function like Google’s Knowledge Graph to provide an idea of the kinds of things the enterprise might do with both search and semantics together.

Following up on the comments made by MarkLogic CEO Gary Bloom at his keynote address at the conference, Buxton explained that, “the function in MarkLogic we are working on in engineering is a way to store and manage triples in the MarkLogic database natively, right alongside structured and unstructured information – a specialized triples index so queries are very fast, and so you can do SPARQL queries in MarkLogic. So, with MarkLogic 7 we will have a world-class triple store and world-beating information store – no one else does documents, values and triples in combination the way MarkLogic 7 will.”

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Next month’s Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco will include a number of panels featuring experts from virtually every facet of the evolving world of semantic web technologies. Experts from major companies and successful startups will share their knowledge on such topics as semantic video, search, financial data, and semantic Big Data. Early bird prices end at midnight tonight. Save $500 off on-site prices and register now!

SemTechBiz Panels

Beyond the Blob: Semantic Video’s Coming Of Age – TV and Video Metadata powers video search, discovery, personalization, and is increasingly used as the basis for targeted advertising and product placement. Join this panel as they explore and discuss advances made and challenges faced over the past year in semantic applications for video.

RDF as a Universal Healthcare Exchange Language – RDF offers a practical evolutionary pathway to semantic interoperability. It enables information to be readily linked and exchanged with full semantic fidelity while leveraging existing IT infrastructure investments. Being schema-flexible, RDF allows multiple evolving data models and vocabularies to peacefully co-exist in the same instance data, without loss of semantic fidelity. This panel will discuss the goal of adopting RDF/Linked Data as a universal healthcare exchange language. Read more

One in 50 American children have autism, according to the latest figures released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March. One of the winners of the YarcData Graph Analytics Challenge, announced in April, can make a difference in better understanding the causes of the disease.

Taking second place in the competition, the work of Adam Lugowski, Dr. John Gilbert, and Kevin Dewesse, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, leveraged a dataset created for the Mayo Clinic Smackdown project, that has the same structure and property types – and scale – as the medical organization’s actual Big Data sets around autism, but which uses publicly available data in place of the real thing. The team can’t use the real data because it includes private information about patients, diagnosis, prescriptions, and the like.

But the actual data deployed for the project doesn’t matter, says Lugowski . “The goal is to find relationships we have never thought of before, and this way it doesn’t prejudice the algorithm,” he says. Using YarcData’s uRIKA graph analytics appliance, the algorithm queries the Smackdown dataset – which in its smallest version has almost 40 million RDF triples and in its largest is about 100 times bigger, mirroring the size of all the Mayo Clinic’s actual autism data – to discover commonalities among the data, mimicking how the real data sets could be queried in search of common precursors among clusters of patients with the diagnosis.

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Paris, France, May 02, 2013 –(PR.com)– In the form of a flexible, generic and taxonomy-driven solution that leverages the XBRL extension of the Oracle 11g XML database, XBRL Analyzer is the first application of its kind to release XBRL data from the technical arena and allow business end-users to regain control over their analysis needs. With XBRL Analyzer, the underlying technical sophistication of the XBRL standard is masked, and non-technical users can freely exploit and extract business-relevant information from mass volumes of highly-dimensional XBRL data that, without analysis, would be effectively devoid of value. Read more

Kay Ewbank of I Programmer recently wrote, “JSON Linked Data is getting closer with the publication of two Last Call Working Drafts by the W3C’s RDF Working Group and its JSON-LD Community Group. JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linking Data) is a lightweight Linked Data format designed to provide context for data and to help JSON data interoperate at Web-scale. Based on the JSON format, it is easy for humans to read and write at the same time as being easy for machines to parse and generate.  The first working draft is for JSON-LD 1.0, which sets out a common JSON representation format for expressing directed graphs; mixing both Linked Data and non-Linked Data in a single document. The aim is to provide a smooth upgrade path from JSON to JSON-LD, though any systems already using JSON can remain in their currently deployed state. JSON-LD aims to give you a way to work with Linked Data.” Read more

The W3C has announced that eleven specifications of SPARQL 1.1 have been published as recommendations. SPARQL is the Semantic Web query language.  We caught up with Lee Feigenbaum, VP Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics Inc. to discuss the significance of this announcement. Feigenbaum is a SPARQL expert who currently serves as the Co-Chair of the W3C’s SPARQL Working Group, leading the design of SPARQL.

Feigenbaum says, “SPARQL 1.1 is a huge leap forward in providing a standard way to access and update Semantic Web data. By reaching W3C Recommendation status, Semantic Web developers, vendors, publishers and consumers have a stable, well-vetted, and interoperable set of standards they can rely on for the foreseeable future.”

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Ivan Herman of the W3C reports, “The W3C Government Linked Data Working Group has published two Last Call Working Drafts: The RDF Data Cube Vocabulary. This is an RDF vocabulary for publishing multidimensional data, particularly statistical data. It is compatible with the cube model that underlies SDMX (Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange), a widely used ISO standard. The Data Cube Vocabulary brings essential SDMX elements to RDF, providing a standard way for governments to publish statistical information as Linked Data. Comments are welcome through 08 April.” Read more

Seevl, the free music discovery service that leverages semantic technology to help users conduct searches across a world of facts-in-combination to find new musical experiences and artist information, has launched an app for Deezer that will formally go live Monday.  (See our in-depth look at Seevl here, and a screencast of how the service works here.) Deezer is a music streaming service available in more than 150 countries – not the U.S. yet, though – that claims more than 20 million users.

Seevl, which late last year updated its YouTube plug-in with more music discovery features and better integration with the YouTube user interface, models its data in RDF. In a blog post earlier this year, founder and CEO Alexandre Passant explained how the Seevl service uses Redis for simple key-value queries and SPARQL for some more complex operations, like recommendations or social network analysis, as well as provenance. As for the new Deezer app, it provides the same features as the YouTube app for easily navigating and discovering music among millions of tracks, Passant tells the Semantic Web Blog.

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Algebraix Data Corporation today announced its SPARQL Server(TM) RDF database successfully executed all 17 of its queries on the SP2 benchmark up to one billion triples on one computer node. The SP2 benchmark is the most computationally complex for testing SPARQL performance and no other vendor has reported results for all queries on data sizes above five million triples. Read more

Ivan Herman reports, “This has been in the works for a while, but it is done now: the latest (3.4.0 version) of the python RDFLib library has just been released, and it includes and RDFa 1.1, microdata, and turtle-in-HTML parser. In other words, the user can add structured data to an HTML file, and that will be parsed into RDF and added to an RDFLib Graph structure. This is a significant step, and thanks to Gunnar Aastrand Grimnes, who helped me adding those parsers into the main distribution.”

He goes on, “I have written a blog last summer on some of the technical details of those parsers; although there has been updates since then, essentially following the minor changes that the RDFa Working has defined for RDFa, as well as changes/updates on the microdata->RDF algorithm, the general approach described in that blog remains valid, and it is not necessary to repeat it here. Read more