Photo courtesy: Flickr/rvaphotodude

Last month at its MarkLogic World 2013 conference, the enterprise NoSQL database platform provider talked semantics as it related to its MarkLogic Server technology that ingests, manages and searches structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data (see our story here). The vendor late last week was scheduled to provide an early access release of MarkLogic 7, formally due by year’s end, to some dozens of initial users.

“People see a convergence of search and semantics,” Stephen Buxton, Director, Product Management, recently told The Semantic Web Blog. To that end, a lot of the vendor’s customers have deployed MarkLogic technology as well as specialized triple stores, but what they really want, he says, is an integrated approach, “a single database that does both individually and both together,” he says. “We see the future of search as semantics and the future of semantics as search, and they are very much converging.” At its recent conference, Buxton says the company demonstrated a MarkLogic app it built to function like Google’s Knowledge Graph to provide an idea of the kinds of things the enterprise might do with both search and semantics together.

Following up on the comments made by MarkLogic CEO Gary Bloom at his keynote address at the conference, Buxton explained that, “the function in MarkLogic we are working on in engineering is a way to store and manage triples in the MarkLogic database natively, right alongside structured and unstructured information – a specialized triples index so queries are very fast, and so you can do SPARQL queries in MarkLogic. So, with MarkLogic 7 we will have a world-class triple store and world-beating information store – no one else does documents, values and triples in combination the way MarkLogic 7 will.”

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TEMIS, the leading provider of semantic content enrichment solutions for the enterprise, and MarkLogic Corporation, provider of the only enterprise NoSQL database, have announced they are extending their partnership to deliver world-class content enrichment over unstructured Big Data. With new, enhanced integration capabilities, TEMIS’ Luxid® and MarkLogic® Server can now help organizations do more with their content. Read more

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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Today marks International Women’s Day 2013, and Dow Jones & Company is marking the date with a video and infographics that looks at women’s evolution in business. The data informing these elements comes from its Factiva information service, which recently enhanced its metadata and taxonomy credentials with MarkLogic Corp.’s search technology (see our story here).

Factiva was used to map media mentions of women executives in search of the top 20 over the past ten years. The featured individuals are ranked in the infographic according to the number of mentions received in publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Barron’s to China’s People’s Daily.

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Dow Jones & Company’s Factiva information service has long been distinguished by the semantic tools it applies to its content to surface relevant search information. Last week the company announced what it says is one of the most significant investments it’s made in the Factiva product suite, licensing new search technology from MarkLogic Corp.

The arrangement is positioned as providing standardized search technology across the Dow Jones digital network, including Factiva, WSJ.com and Dow Jones Financial Services products. To be specific, the investment in one underlying search technology that will be used by the company’s multiple businesses and products means that, “one powerful, unified search platform will service the search needs of our consumer and enterprise customers around the world,” says Georgene Huang, head of Factiva. “Any improvements or customizations we build atop this infrastructure will be scalable and efficiently accessible to all.” That will allow better and easier synergies between the development, products and the content, she says.

The new search technology, Huang says, complements its continuing investment in Factiva’s core metadata and taxonomy strengths in many ways.

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MarkLogic has a new CEO. According to the company, “Gary Bloom, a proven technology executive who was most recently the CEO and president at eMeter, has been named president and chief executive officer. Gary brings an exceptional background that includes more than two decades of successful leadership in enterprise software. He was the CEO and president at eMeter, which provides smart grid management software for electric, gas, and water utilities. eMeter was recently acquired by Siemens Corporation. Prior to that, Gary was a consultant of TPG, a leading global private investment firm.” Read more

Semantic technology is scoring more goals in the sports world. The BBC, for example, which created the FIFA World Cup 2010 website that leveraged semantic technology, is at it again as London prepares for the 2012 Summer Olympics. Brazil has gotten into the action, too, with an Internet portal there taking soccer to the semantic web set. At the upcoming SemTech conference in San Francisco, attendees will have an opportunity to hear the latest details about both efforts.

Over at the BBC, for example, the 2012 Olympics site accompanies a completely redesigned BBC Sports site, both based on technology including Fluid Operations’ Information Workbench to support the editorial process for the BBC’s Dynamic Semantic Publishing strategy, from authoring and curation to publishing of ontology and instance data following an editorial workflow. The BBC environment since the World Cup also has been updated to use the MarkLogic document store for managing rapidly changing statistics, navigation and ultimately all content objects, as lead architect Jem Rayfield described it in this blog posting. Today, the triple store that’s been behind the BBC’s past work is extended to cover every team, athlete, venue, discipline, country and so on, Rayfield told The Semantic Web Blog.

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There are three trends that I observed at SemTech 2011 in San Francisco last week.  First was the increased role of native XML databases used in combination with RDF data stores.  Second was the many natural-language processing tools and vendors at the conference.  And third was the role of semantic annotations and standards directly in web content.  I think these trends are related.

One of the keynote presentations at the SemTech 2011 conference was done by the BBC.  They presented their core architecture for managing web content as having two main components: a native XML database(MarkLogic)  for content and a RDF triple store for “metadata.”  These tools were at the core of their architecture for their web sites.

Another presentation was done by the Mayo Clinic.  They also are using MarkLogic for web content and are also using semantic web technologies.  Their diagrams show that there are many ways for these systems to interact.

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