Coming in June from start-up Meronymy is a new RDF enterprise database management system, the Meronymy SPARQL Database Server. The company, founded by Inge Henriksen, began life because of the need he saw for a high-performance and more scalable RDF database server.

The idea to focus on a database server exclusively oriented to Linked Data and the Semantic Web came as a result of Henriksen’s work over the last decade as an IT consultant implementing many semantic solutions for customers in sectors such as government and education. “One issue that always came up was performance,” he explains, especially when performing more advanced SPARQL queries against triple stores using filters, for example.

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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.

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Researchers at the University of Texas – Pan American have found that HBase “has the edge in data management for next generation Internet and cloud computing users.” The article states, “An open-source, non-relational database written in Java that can scale to thousands of servers, HBase makes many features of Google’s proprietary, high-performance distributed storage system BigTable available to the programming community. It also features a fail-safe library that runs ‘on top of’ a server cluster — a global architecture that detects and handles failures at the local level before they spread.” Read more

According to a recent article, “A new lightweight web service interface for accessing massive amounts of life science research data across multiple public and private domains has been developed by researchers at RIKEN, Japan’s flagship research institute. Through the powerful RIKEN Scientists’ Networking System (SciNetS), the service provides a secure, flexible and light weight interface to millions of data records and their network of semantic relationships, ushering in a new era of collaboration, analysis and information-sharing for life science research and applied innovation.” Read more

Silk, a new semantic web app was discussed at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam last week. According to one article, “Silk is an app for the web that wants to help you collect, sort and view the information that you need without making you comb through the data yourself. This is an app that will help you navigate the semantic web seas, also known as ‘Web 3.0’. Think of it as an intern that knows everything about a given subject and can deliver that information to you with minimal effort.” Read more