“Attune is my favorite kind of semantic app: the kind where users can’t see the semtech, but it’s making life easier and better for them, and the developers, by being smart and flexible. We’re proud that Pancake has built Attune using Stardog as its RDF database.” – Kendall Clark, Clark & Parsia

Yesterday, in Part I of this two-part series, we learned about the new productivity application, Attune. Here in Part II, Robert Butler, president of Pancake Technology, tells us about the technology under the hood and why he chose to build Attune from the ground-up on top of Semantic Technologies.

SemanticWeb.com: What Semantic Tech are you using?
Robert Butler: Attune was built on top of Stardog, Clark & Parsia’s new RDF database. All of the data, therefore, is stored as RDF data and we use Stardog’s intuitive native interface to update or create data. Queries are run using SPARQL. We have built OWL 2 ontologies for Attune, currently targeted at the QL profile. We plan to increase our use of ontology expressability, eventually using either EL or RL.

SW: Why did you choose Semantic Technologies rather than other options?
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Pancake Technology, LLC has released a new productivity application called Attune and we caught up with Robert Butler, the company’s president (“The president of Pancake” — now there’s a job title I’m envious of!) to learn more about Attune and the semantic platform under its hood. In part one of this two-part interview, we learn about what users of Attune can experience now and what they can look forward to as the product matures.

Q: What is Attune?
A: Attune is a flexible and powerful personal productivity application, built to overcome limitations in current productivity tools. Attune allows you to create lists, notes, tasks and projects and relate them to each other.

Q: With a lot of productivity applications out there, what’s different here? Why did you create Attune?
A: I have long been frustrated by the inflexibility of existing productivity tools. They almost always seem overly rigid and unable to capture the complexity of my thoughts and projects. My brain doesn’t always operate in terms of tasks and projects, which is why I often resort to note taking to capture my thoughts and why I like products like Evernote. If you are going to build a tool that can capture and remember the vast majority of information in the world, you need text and images. On the other hand, the goal of all the free-form text and images out there is to actually use it to get something done, which brings you back to the structure of tasks and projects. To our knowledge, there isn’t a tool out there that handles this duality well.

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In the final installment of this two-part series, Dean Allemang and Scott Henninger look into how the insights about semantic web education have an impact on the adoption of semantic web technologies.

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