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SemTech’s Wave of Semantic News

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

There was plenty of product news coming out of this week’s Semantic Technology conference in San Jose, with companies including Thomson/Reuters, TopQuadrant and Expert System making significant product announcements.

Other noteworthy announcements include:

  • Ontoprise, one of the builders behind Vulcan Research’s Project Halo, announced OntoBroker 5.1 and OntoStudio 2.1. The company touts the Ontoprise product suite as being the first to support all major Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) SemanticWeb recommendations including OWL, RDF, RDFS, SPARQL, as well as the F-Logic industry standard.

    With version 5.1, the Triple Store OntoBroker RDF can transform between OWL, RDF, and F-Logic via the same ontology management API so users can choose the right ontology language for the right task. It also provides improved multi-core performance.

    A new collaboration server lets OntoBroker acts as the central server with remote access to allow for the distributed usage, management, and editing of ontologies, and for collaborative modeling with OntoStudio 2.1, the vendor says.

    OntoStudio itself offers new features, including the ability to separate schema and facts and re-use central elements in different ontologies, and an improved mapping tool to help knowledge engineers quickly map heterogeneous data sources, the company says.

    The company also announced that it will be developing an expert system for the largest hydroelectric power plant in Southeast Asia. The expert system from Ontoprise called CEXS (Computer Guided Shell Expert System) will support the
    operating staff of the Bakun hydroelectric plant in Malaysia in the detection of possible malfunctions, helping to avoid outages by the use of rules and expert knowledge, Ontoprise says.

  • Franz Inc. has introduced AllegroGraph 3.0, a high-performance triple-set database designed to help companies glean insight from their troves of unstructured data, on the rise from the growth of social networks and semantic web applications.

    Capable of storing and querying billions of RDF statements, the company says the product provides customers an events-based view (what type of event, who was there, start and end time, and location) of data sets, with the goal of helping them speedily link various pieces of information and reason through it.

    The vendor also is aiming at helping developers learn how to create scalable applications for the semantic web: It has introduced a new Learning Center for that purpose, and to help drive understanding of RDF database technologies and best practices for its software.

  • Pragati Synergetic Research released Expozé 2.0, which analyzes complex information systems to facilitate their interoperability, reuse, knowledge capture, and quality assurance. Expozé is an integrated set of modules that lets users dissect and analyze knowledge systems, ranging from structured sources such as database schemas, to semistructured sources, like OWL and RDF-based ontologies and rule-based systems, to unstructured sources, such as natural language text, the vendor says.

    “We are confident that Expozé’s niche technology is the missing piece for overcoming the semantic mediation bottleneck on the semantic web,” said Mala Mehrotra, president and CEO of Pragati, in a statement. The vendor has customers in both the emergency management and military sectors.

  • Professional services firm Zepheira, which specializes in semantic technologies and enterprise data integration, said it had facilitated the integration of two leading open source semantic web frameworks.

    These are the Mulgara semantic store (a scalable RDF data store, written in Java and designed to scale to hundreds of millions of RDF statements) and Aduna’s Sesame Version 2.2, an open source Java framework for the storage, inferencing and querying of RDF data.

    David Wood, a Zepheira partner and Mulgara project member, said in a statement that he sees tremendous value in the integration of the projects, their developers and their communities of users.

    “The comprehensive set of APIs and standards from Sesame along with the scalability and speed of Mulgara gives developers a single port of call for Semantic Web projects of all levels,” said Paul Gearon, founder and leader of the Mulgara Project, in a statement. “We have now combined the experience and skills of the developers from both projects, giving us much greater capacity for ongoing development than when our efforts were split between unrelated systems.”

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