Enterprise NoSQL database platform provider MarkLogic has come into some cash: a $25 million round of growth capital from investors including Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital, Northgate Capital, CEO Gary Bloom and other corporate executives. Yesterday, at the company’s MarkLogic World 2013 conference, Bloom also prepared the audience to hear more today from company executives about MarkLogic’s next steps in semantics for its MarkLogic Server technology that ingests, manages and searches structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

“The way to think about this is that when we look at semantics, we didn’t … say we just want to check a box on semantics,” Bloom said, by working with partners on some low-hanging fruit – although it will be collaborating with them on various semantic enrichment capabilities. “We think semantics is critical technology, and more interesting I believe is that it is a critical technology that is both a search technology as well as a database technology.” Others in the marketplace will focus on changing their search engines to do semantics, but optimum results won’t come if all that’s being done is layering in semantics at the search level, he said.

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“We want to help the world make sense of data and we think graphs are the best way of doing that.”

That’s the word from Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo Technology, which makes the open-source Neo4j NoSQL graph database. He’s not talking in terms of RDF-centric solutions, even though he says he’s 100 percent in agreement with the vision of the semantic web and machine readability. “The world is a graph,” Eifrem says, “and RDF is a great way of connecting things. I’m all in agreement there.” The problem, in his opinion, is that execution on the software end there has been lacking.

“This comes down to usability,” he says, and the average developer, he believes, finds the semantic web-oriented tools largely incomprehensible. Eifrem says he’s speaking from real-world experiences, having worked directly with RDF and taught classes on the semantic web layers. Where it took a week to get students up to speed on things like Jena and Sesame, they ‘get’ the property graph and graph databases in half-a-day, he says. Neo4j stores data in nodes connected by directed, typed relationships with properties on both – also known as a property graph.

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Oversight Systems is in the business of Big Data analytics. Come June, it also will be in the business of having its technology serve as a platform behind third-party business intelligence and analytics applications on-demand – including its ontology approach for integrating data from disparate enterprise systems.

The company currently provides packaged solutions that let front-line employees involved in processes such as procure-to-pay or order-to-cash conduct continuous transaction analysis for insights into transactions that violate business rules, so that the business can take action to close gaps and assure compliance to operational and regulatory requirements. The ontology it’s developed over the years, which includes proprietary semantic and relationship information and infers some additional information, is there to help with the acquisition and preparation of data.

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Earlier this month Gartner named semantic technologies to its top ten trends list (see our story here). Recently, we caught up with Gartner vp and distinguished analyst Debra Logan, the lead author on the semantic technologies section of the Top 10 Technology Trends Impacting Information Infrastructure, 2013, to learn more about sem tech’s earning a place on the list.

One interesting point Logan made is that the top ten trends list actually is a reflection of inquiries Gartner sees from its end-user clients. So, semantic technologies’ spot on the list would seem to indicate a bubbling-up of real-world, enterprise interest. As Logan sees it, it’s very much about information overload, about minimizing the risk and maximizing the value of the data on their hands, and about the availability now from providers like Amazon and Google of infrastructures for analyzing Big Data sets.

“If we could get the same meaning from data, we might actually know what is going on, because we sure don’t now,” says Logan, of the quandary facing enterprise IT leaders. “They are struggling with definition issues and reconciliation because of the proliferation of different IT systems.”

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Embarcadero Technologies, a leading provider of software solutions for application and database development, today announced Embarcadero DB PowerStudio® XE3.5, the latest release of the company’s award-winning database management and development platform. DB PowerStudio XE3.5 is a key component of Embarcadero’s new metadata governance platform, which allows organizations to leverage diverse data across information management and the software development lifecycle for successful data governance initiatives. Read more

Attensity, the leading provider of enterprise social analytics and engagement applications, today announced the release of Attensity Respond 6.0, a new release of Attensity’s Respond application designed to address the specific challenges facing the next generation of multi-channel social customer contact centers and marketers in large corporate environments.

Respond 6.0 provides a unified customer listening post where customer requests in social media as well as in emails, and other channels are automatically -and intelligently- analyzed, classified and routed to appropriate departments for response. Read more

Semantic technologies have made it to Gartner’s list of the top technology trends that will impact information infrastructure this year.

The research firm yesterday released the list of nine trends that it says will play key roles in modernizing information management and in making the role of information governance increasingly important. Semantic technologies come in at No.3 on the list – right behind closely-tied-to trends Big Data and modern information infrastructure.

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There’s more than one way to get a taxonomy. A company can go out and buy one for its industry, for instance, but the risk is that the terms may not relate to how it talks about content in its own organization, and the hierarchy may not be the right fit either. That sets up two potential outcomes, says Chris Riley, VP of marketing at Pingar: You wind up having to customize it, or with users who just ignore it.

It’s possible to build one, but that’s a big job and a costly one, too – especially for many enterprises, where there hasn’t traditionally been a focus on structuring content and so the skills to do it aren’t necessarily there. While industries like publishing, oil and gas, life sciences, and pharma have that bent, many other verticals do not. In fact, Riley notes, they may realize they have a content organization problem, but not that what they’d benefit from to address it even goes by the name ‘taxonomy.’

Pingar’s looking to help out those enterprises that want to bring organization to their content, whether or not they’re familiar with the concept of a taxonomy. It just launched its automated Taxonomy Generator Service that uses an organization’s own content to build a taxonomy that mirrors its own way of talking about things and its understanding of relationships between child and parent terms.

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Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar recently shared eight business models created by Deloitte UK to promote open data and insight. Howard writes, “When I asked whether the push to free up government data was resulting in economic activity and startup creation, I started to receive emails from people around the United States and Europe. I’ll be publishing more of what I learned in our ongoing series of open data interviews and profiles over the next month, but two responses are worth sharing now. The first response concerned Deloitte’s ongoing research into open data in the United Kingdom, conducted in collaboration with the Open Data Institute.” Read more

How’s your company’s metadata governance strategy? When it comes to the business planning and software development lifecycle, it’s likely it could be more solid, one company says.

“There are a ton of companies making a lot of money now providing raw storage as things like e-commerce, mobile, and cloud technologies generate big volumes of consumer and behavioral data,” says Henry Olson, director of product management at Embarcadero Technologies.  “But many organizations can’t make effective use out of it. There’s an obscurity problem that people can’t find stuff or know what to make of what they do find.”

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