By Jennifer Zaino and Tom Dunlap

SAN JOSE, Calif. — At the SemTech 2009 Conference here, Metatomix announced it has upgraded to version 6.0 of its core technology, MTX Semantic Platform.

Metatomix is a leading provider of semantic tools to justice and public safety, financial services, manufacturing and life sciences organizations.

Key features of version 6.0 include the ability to operate as a stand-alone platform or inside a standard J2EE Application Server certified on Apache Tomcat, IBM Websphere, and Oracle Weblogic.

“Version 6.0 of our semantic platform is yet another example that Metatomix is
determined to bring next-generation semantic technology to our customers and
partners,” said Metatomix Chief Technology Officer Howard Greenblatt. “The new
version of the platform allows our customer base to discover and publish key insights
easier and faster, thus maximizing the power of semantic technology for the enterprise like never before.”

One of the major components of the release is its Semantic Editing Framework. Christian Barr, product management director, considers the technology to be a game-changing toolset from the perspective of being able to rapidly build and construct rich web client applications by leveraging back-end ontologies at the front end, so that it forms a structure for the user interface to interact with the server.

Payments software provider ACI Worldwide is one of the first customers of the technology, using it to help its clients collect data from across banking enterprises to provide complete pictures of consumer transactions to uncover fraud and risk. “It creates an ongoing case that also involves workflow so that components of the platform are used to build business process workflows to manage a case from initiation through closing,” Barr says.

SEM lets ACI quickly and easily modify some of the business rules and representation of the information at the user level, which is important to reduce the amount of time required to configure and customize the solution for each customer. Barr says it can cut implementation cycle times by 30 or 40 percent.

Another big foundational change in Semantic Platform 6, he says, is the move to the OSGI based architecture, a common way of deploying and reusing certain components in the Java framework.

“That creates a smooth transition for developers to focus on the rapid application development process,” Barr says. The ontology editor has been enhanced so that it makes it easier to deploy the ontology to a given set of business logic, and Metatomix says it has created a better facility for communication with RDF stores.

Barr says the company’s own professional services staff and its systems integrators partners are among the direct beneficiaries of these features, as many of Metatomix’ customers in the justice space don’t have the resources to do their own development. But, “what that translates to for the end customer are lower costs of implementation,” he says.

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