Courtesy Flickr BoneDaddy.P7

Some of the foundational players in the semantic technology space have introduced new releases of their platforms coinciding with this week’s SemTech conference.

One of them is Cambridge Semantics, with version 2.0 of its Anzo platform. The Collaboration Server component of the app dev platform now incorporates its own storage into the system to increase performance, and has the ability to track data lineage. As the semantic fabric where user self-serviceable data is stored, it’s important for applications such as risk management and compliance in the financial industry to understand data provenance. Through the Anzo for Excel component, data that has been isolated in individual (and to IT’s dismay, ubiquitous) Excel spreadsheets can be accessed, shared and managed, making the darn things more palatable to internal tech organizations, Cambridge says.

A recent survey conducted by a third party for Microsoft, Cambridge says, revealed that 37 percent of financial organizations had more than 1,000 spreadsheets critical to their business. “All are unprotected, isolated data sets with no security, no way of achieving compliance, that may not be findable, that may get emailed around and morph and change,” says Steve Kludt, EVP of Marketing.

“That goes away because your Excel spreadsheets can become part of the IT data structure–you get security, workflow, and governance.” Connect Excel to the fabric, he explains, and it’s a nice portal to get data into and out of the database, but it also turns Excel into an application builder and full-blown application, with the capability of creating forms in Excel, so that business users don’t have to wait on IT to do what they need to and yet not open the door to compromising data that may be critical to compliance requirements. Doubleclick on a spreadsheet, log in, and Anzo will track who made changes and when, so that you automatically get the lineage behind the data. “And as people fill in forms they can see other information that might be pertinent to what they’re doing,” he says. And there’s no manual integration of that data, with the potential that introduces for errors.

“There are a lot of content management systems to store things in mini silos but we are the first to get into the content of the silos, into the spreadsheets themselves and look after data so it is findable, discoverable, and auditable,” says CTO Sean Martin. “That data you captured is now captured in such a way that next year someone can find that information because every element of it is described using semantic tags, so u can seach by concept or content. You end up with a strategic advantage the CIO cares about.”

The third component, Anzo on the Web, enables entry to Cambridge’s semantic fabric through the web to find information based on meaning and analyze and report on it, and now also edit it in real-time. “As an end user you can assemble forms (lenses) for visualizations but now an end user can take the forms for doing input,” Kludt says. “So it’s a short hop to let end users construct applications, to build forms, menus and reports so in an afternoon you can put together a comprehensive web application that has access to everything in the semantic fabric, including data from Excel or anywhere else.”

Other New Foundational Developments

• Franz Inc. released its native RDF database AllegroGraph 4.0 last week, which the company is calling a pattern-breaker in the way it deals with large numbers of triples to better enable multiple clients to concurrently add data in a transaction. The typical usage pattern for triple-stores – bulk-loading an initial set of triples, building indices, materializing inferences for types and then allowing for queries involving reasoning — typically ends up being disastrous for adding new triples or changing the ontology, because of long waits to re-materialize the inferences, it says. The new release of AllegroGraph 4.0 includes a forward writing transaction log and a check-pointing mechanism to provide complete recoverability. All triples, it says, are always completely indexed, enabling SPARQL queries, Prolog queries, and reasoning to happen at full speed while other processes are adding data.

• Expressor Software today announced version 2.3 of the expressor semantic data integration system that it says features enhanced low-latency data processing performance and strengthened support for Netezza. The new version includes “data windowing” functionality that provides developers with fine-grained, real-time data control, certified support for Netezza NPS 5.0 and bi-directional connectivity with Netezza via ODBC.

• Intellidimension, Inc. a provider of semantic web infrastructure technologies for Microsoft Windows and the .NET Framework, released Semantics Platform v 2.0 with new features to satisfy requirements for storing and querying larger distributed data sets. The Semantics.Datacenter RDF storage solution boosts speed for data distributed and processed over an expandable set of worker nodes deployed in a cluster, and Semantics.Framework, which hosts an RDF library for the .NET Framework that enables developers to create Semantic Web applications in .NET languages using an API is now available in an Express Edition that has a couple less features but no licensing costs, the company says. Semantics.Server v2.0 provides RDF data management capabilities to Microsoft SQL Server, including support for SPARQL queries.

• Don’t forget to propose your startup for our Semantic Web Impact Awards. The deadline is Sept. 15.

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