Clark & Parsia’s Stardog lightweight RDF database is moving into release candidate 1.0 mode just in time for next week’s upcoming Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco next week. The product’s been stable and useable for awhile now, but a 1.0 nomenclature still carries weight with a good number of IT buyers.

The focus for the product, says cofounder and managing principal Kendall Clark, is to be optimized for what he says is the fat part of the market – and that’s not the part that is dealing with a trillion RDF triples. “Most people and organizations don’t need to scale to trillions of anything,” though scaling up, and up, and up, is where most of Clark & Parsia’s competitors have focused their attention, he says. “We’ve seen a significant percentage of what people are doing with semantic technology and most applications are not at a billion triples today.” Take as an example Clark & Parsia’s customer, NASA, which built an expertise location system based on semantic technology that today is still not more than 20 million triples. “You might say that’s a little toy but not if you are at NASA and need defined experts, it is a real, valuable thing and we see this all the time,” he says.

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If you missed this excellent live webcast with Evren Sirin, CTO, Clark & Parsia, the recorded webcast is now available.  You also can meet Evren in Washington DC, November 29-December 1, 2011 for SemTechBiz DC. The customer mentioned in this case study, JP Morgan Chase, will be co-presenting and discussing how they are implementing Access Control using Semantic Technologies.

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Access control is an essential part of nearly every IT system; Read more

At JPMorgan Chase, application security and semantic web technology are teaming up. David C. Laurance, who works in the former area at the financial services giant, is pursuing an initiative with semantic technology vendor Clark & Parsia, and its CTO Evren Sirin, that’s focused on authorization policy management. The primary goal is to ensure that a given access control policy – enabled by the XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) Oasis standard that provides a high-level XML-based language to describe access control policies for distributed resources – covers the actual business requirements for the application it protects.

It’s critical in the financial sector, with its trove of customer records and accounts and its requirements to separate duties around actions such as placing and settling trades, to have robust access control capabilities in place. Other verticals – think of health care and its rules and regulations around patient privacy – also take advantage of the XACML standard to describe control policies, to say in a declarative way which kinds of subjects can perform what kinds of actions on which resources.

Photo: Flickr/ Alexandre Dulaunoy

But XACML on its own doesn’t catch those things that might be wrong in a policy – the door may be left open to contradictory permissions because of the combination of different user characteristics embedded in a policy, for example.

Photo: Flickr/nathangibbs

“This is a matter of what kind of analysis do I have to do for critical policies to make sure that they’re right,” Laurance explains. “When you have two different permissions, that’s where you can get into mischief.” That mischief might be the purposeful actions of a rogue trader out to defraud a bank, or it might be the accidental result of not ensuring that the right oversight and authorizations are maintained. Either way, it’s a potential problem.

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Ask a group of Semantic Web professionals where the data should live when you’re doing data integration projects – which is just what Cambridge Semantics VP Lee Feigenbaum, acting in his capacity as co-chair of the W3C’s SPARQL Working Group, did at a panel at last week’s SemTech – and don’t expect to get a single, agreed-upon answer.

Among the choices:

“Federation will crush warehousing,” Eric Prud’hommeaux of the W3C and its Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group said with an eye to provocation. “Leave data where the authorities have it and take advantage of individual domain contributions.” The basic idea of federation is that data stays in its source systems and you do integration dynamically, querying source systems on the fly.

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Is your enterprise content management system the place where your information goes to die? It doesn’t have to be that way.

At the SemTech conference in June, Kendall Clark of Clark & Parsia will formally launch Spanner and Stardog, the former of which is already in use at NASA and the latter of which will be entering private beta mode in the next couple of weeks. Spanner takes semantics to ECM, to help enterprises make the pivot from unstructured to semi-structured and structured information management affordable, useful and valuable, Clark says.

Stardog is its RDF database aimed at the high-value, lower-dataset size of the market, and Spanner will be able to utilize it. Alternately, organizations that already have an existing commitment to an RDF database can continue to employ that in conjunction with Spanner.

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Empire is an implementation of the Java Persistence API (JPA) for RDF and the Semantic Web. Instead of another implementation of relational databases, Empire implements JPA for RDF and SPARQL, thus allowing developers who are familiar with JPA, but not with semantic web techologies like RDF, to make an easy transition into this brave, new world. JPA is a specification for managing Java objects, most commonly with an RDBMS; it’s industry standard for Java ORMs.

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The 2009 Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech) took place June 14-18, 2009 in San Jose, California. SemTech is produced by Semantic Universe and brings together the entire marketplace of semantic technology vendors, developers, researchers, start-ups, investors and customers. Here is a small sample of the hundreds of companies who signed up to attend:

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