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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Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

Bill Guinn, CTO Product Enablers, Amdocs Product Business Unit, delivered a keynote at the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco. His talk was one of the highlights for anyone interested in how Semantic Technology can be used in enterprise systems.

“I truly believe that semantics can be a game changer in just about any B2C model.” – Bill Guinn, Amdocs

Amdocs, a company focused on innovating in the space of Customer Experience Systems, is a $3 Billion company that provides customer care, revenue management, and operational support for large telecommunications companies. To do this requires heavy duty transaction processing systems, with Amdocs processing a few billion transactions per day, resulting in petabytes of information. In his keynote, Mr. Guinn addressed how Amdocs leveraged Semantic Technology to “improve revenue, reduce cost, and improve customer satisfaction.”

The full keynote is presented in the video below. Read more

This webcast presents a case study from Amdocs, the market leader in customer experience systems, and Franz, Inc. a leader in Semantic Technology implementations.

LIVE WEBCAST *
Date:	Thursday, December 16, 2010
Time:	2:00pm ET / 11:00am PT
Cost:	FREE
* The webcast will be recorded and archived here at SemanticWeb.com

In today’s connected online world, to optimize a customer oriented business requires real time contextual customer knowledge across all business channels and relevant social and competitive forces. This knowledge must be used to control the intended outcome of each business transaction. In complex, heavily customer-centric businesses such as Telecommunications, Health Care, and Financial Services, the optimal business must understand how each action of the business and the individual customer relates to the profitability of the business and customer satisfaction. This is possible if systems holistically see what is going on in real time, determine the meaning of these activities, and in-stream decide and take the optimal action which maximizes profit and customer stickiness. Every business function should be coordinated and driven through a complete awareness of the business theatre. Read more

The prize for Google’s AI challenge – creating a bot to play the game Planet Wars as intelligently as possible – has been taken by a developer from semantic web vendor Franz Inc.  Gábor Melis, who works on the company’s Lisp-based AI database, claimed the win for his Lisp-built Bocsimacko bot that rocked in completing each of 200 turns in one second in a single thread of code.

That’s cool, but even cooler is that what Melis did in taking his observations of how humans solve the challenges of the Planet Wars game – defending their turf, allocating surplus resources for colonization and attacking opponents – and making a prototype of those heuristics in LISP may foreshadow how that programming language can have greater resonance in a Semantic Web world.

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— 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.

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The Semantic Web is nearing the point of widespread practical adoption:

• The core specifications have stabilized

• Tools and frameworks implementing key features have been through several development cycles

• An increasing number of major software companies have developed semantically enabled products or are actively researching the space

As companies start to translate theory into real applications, they are confronted with a host of practical software engineering issues:

• What is the standard or recommended functional architecture of a semantic application?

• How does that architecture relate to the Semantic Web standards?

• Which of those standards are stable and which can be expected to evolve in ways that would significantly impact prior applications?

• What types of tools/frameworks exist that can be leveraged to help implement semantic applications?

• How mature are the various categories of Semantic Web tools/frameworks?

• Can API standardization be expected for certain tool/framework categories?

• What best practices exist for the design, implementation and deployment of semantic applications?

• What future trends in support for semantic application development can be expected?

This panel session gathers together semantics experts from the software industry to address these and other practical issues relating to the development of semantic applications.

Attachment: Panel – Developing Semantic Web Applications (24.68 MB)

Presenters:

Henry Story
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Staff Engineer

 

Dean Allemang
TopQuadrant
Dr. Allemang specializes in innovative applications of knowledge technology and brings to TopQuadrant over 15 years of experience in research, deployment, and development of knowledge-based systems. He developed the curriculum for Top Quadrant’s successful training series for Semantic Web technologies, which he has been presenting to customers world-wide for four years. Dean has completed a master’s degree at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall scholar, a PhD at the Ohio State University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Scholar, and is a two-time winner of the Swiss Prize for Innovation in Technology. Prior to joining TopQuadrant, Dr. Allemang was the Vice-President of Customer Applications at Synquiry Technologies, were he filed two patents on the application of graph matching algorithms to the problems of semantic information interchange.

Dr. Jans Aasman
President & CEO, Franz Inc.

Dr. Jans Aasman, Franz’s President and CEO, was a longtime customer and joined Franz from TNO Telecom based in The Netherlands. Prior to Franz, he worked at KPN Research, the research lab of a major Dutch telecommunication company. Dr. Aasman was a tenured professor in Industrial Design at the Technical University of Delft, where he held the chair title Informational Ergonomics of Telematics and Intelligent Products. He also was a visiting scientist at the Computer Science Department of Prof. Dr. Alan Newell at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Aasman holds a degree in experimental and cognitive psychology from the University of Groningen, with specialization in Psychophysiology and Cognitive Psychology.

Eric Miller
Zepheira, LLC

Eric Miller is the President of Zepheira. Prior to founding Zepheira, Eric led the Semantic Web Initiative for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT where he led the architectural and technical leadership in the design and evolution of the Semantic Web. Eric is a frequent and sought after international speaker in the areas of International Web standards, knowledge management, collaboration, development, and deployment.

Jeroen Wester
Aduna

CTO