The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is kicking off a project with Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. in Japan to build a large-scale RDF store in the cloud capable of processing hundreds of billions of triples. The idea, says DERI research fellow Dr. Michael Hausenblas, “is to build up a platform that allows you to process and convert any kind of data” — from relational databases to LDAP record-based, directory-like data, but also streaming sources of data, such as sensors and even the Twitter firehose.

The project has defined eight different potential enterprise use cases for such a platform, ranging from knowledge-sharing in health care and life science to dashboards in financial services informed by XBRL data. “Once the platform is there we will implement at least a couple of these use cases on business requirements, and essentially we are going to see which are the most promising for business units,” Hausenblas says.

Read more



Ecosystem image via Shutterstock

As the Semantic Web Blog recently noted, 3RoundStones’ Callimachus Enterprise emerged as the winner of the Top Semantic Technology Start-up competition that was held at the Semantic Tech & Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) in San Francisco a few weeks ago. The commercially supported Linked Data Management system, now being piloted by eight companies, will this summer be released to the general public as Version 1.0.

Callimachus Enterprise is distinguished not only by its technology, but by CTO David Wood’s presentation that spoke to the real business needs of the enterprise today – including rapidly demonstrating value, in its case around exposing, connecting and visualizing disparate enterprise content – and also in that it provides a way for organizations to deal with their enterprise information in an entirely cloud-based solution. It leverages the Amazon cloud.

“A lot of companies are using cloud-based solutions for travel and expense tracking,” says CEO Bernadette Hyland. “But this is the beginning of a new wave.”

Read more

The presence of presence as part of unified communications deployments increasingly is being felt by enterprise users. It’s paying off in better productivity, but it’s when presence gets semantic that the real magic can start to happen.

That’s something that DERI and Cisco, as part of the multi-party Lion2: Enabling Networked Knowledge project funded by Science Foundation Ireland, are exploring. The idea is to “bring more granularity and more meaning to presence than state,” says Cisco lead architect Keith Griffin – that is, an indication that you are available or away. After all, just because you’re sitting at your desk doesn’t necessarily mean you are fully or even partially available, and just because you are on the phone doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t free to respond to instant messages. “The Semantic Web provides more intelligence to that.”

Read more