Semantic Web Community: I’m disappointed in us!  Or at least in our group marketing prowess.  We have been failing to capitalize on two major trends that everyone has been talking about and that are directly addressable by Semantic Web technologies!  For shame.

I’m talking of course about Big Data and NoSQL.  Given that I’ve already given my take on how Semantic Web technology can help with the Big Data problem on SemanticWeb.com, this time around I’ll tackle NoSQL and the Semantic Web.

After all, we gave up SQL more than a decade ago.  We should be part of the discussion.  Heck, even the XQuery guys got in on the action early!

Check out this Google Trends diagram.

NoSQL came out of nowhere in 2009, and now dominates much of the database conversation on the web.  Document stores like MongoDB and CouchDB, distributed, key-value stores such as Riak and Cassandra, and other weird stores like Hadoop-as-database (never understood that usage myself) now dominate the conversation as the alternative to traditional, SQL databases.

Read more

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

MongoDB has been gaining traction: 10gen, which began the MongoDB project and offers commercial MongoDB support services, said that for 2011 there was a 300 percent increase in Fortune 500 enterprise customers. The list included Disney, Viacom, HP and McKesson. The company also noted strong adoption in Europe including Telefonica and The National Archives. In all, 10gen reported that it ended 2011 with more than 400 commercial customers, with numerous large deployments scaling to 1,000 or more servers.

What makes MongoDB appealing to JavaScript programmers working with JSON objects at these and other organizations is its simplicity. If all that’s desired is to have an easy-to-use database where you can add or retrieve JSON objects – the main data type for Javascript developers – it remains an attractive option.

But Franz Inc. proposes an alternative for those who want more sophisticated functionality: Use the semantic power of its AllegroGraph Web 3.0 database to deal with complicated queries, via MongoGraph, a MongoDB API to AllegroGraph technology.

Read more

Franz’s NoSQL database, AllegroGraph has become the first NoSQL database to load over one trillion RDF Triples, a feat that is being called “a major step forward in scalability for the Semantic Web.” According to the article, “A trillion RDF Statements eclipses the current state of the art for the Semantic Web data management but is a primary interest for companies like Amdocs that use triples to represent real-time knowledge about telecom customers. Per-customer, Amdocs uses about 4,000 triples, so a large telecom like China Mobile would easily need 2 trillion triples to have detailed knowledge about each single customer.” Read more

— DR. JANS AASMAN, ROBERT STANLEY

Semantic Universe editor Tony Shaw recently spoke with Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz Inc., and Robert Stanley, President & CEO of IO Informatics, about the announcement of their new strategic partnership to deliver 'fit for purpose' applications created by an innovative Semantic application framework. Their partnership has already seen success with the Pfizer IDEA pilot, which serves as a real-world example of using a semantic application in the pharma industry. This pilot was used to integrate data for compound purity verification and drug product stability analysis. The IDEA project was originally expected to take four to six months to produce results, but by using the AllegroGraph-Sentient framework, it was completed in only six weeks.

Read more