What could you build if the entire web was your database?

A hackathon has been added to the agenda of the Semantic Technology & Business Conference. Semantic Hack, organized by SemanticWeb.com and Diffbot, will be an opportunity for developers and designers to work with RDF, SPARQL, OWL, entity extraction, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, newly available datasets, and other semantic technologies that help make the web more readable, accessible and dynamic for humans and more interpretable by machines. Semantic Hack is free to attend and prior experience with semantics is NOT required to participate.

Registration is open, but space is limited. Hackathon organizers are currently seeking coaches and sponsors; those interested in either role should contact the organizers.

• Who: Developers, designers, and others interested in semantic technology
• What: A day-long hackathon to build applications that help further expand the semantic web, or demonstrate the power of accessible web data
• Where: Hilton San Francisco Union Square
• When: Saturday, June 1, 2013, 9am – 9pm

Current sponsors include Bosatsu Consulting, The National Center for Biomedical Ontology, Protégé, and Stardog.

http://SemanticHack.eventbrite.com

Best Buy has now released its previously announced “Like for Like” Metis API: “BBY Open and the Metis project team are excited to announce the release of our semantically-driven ‘Like for Like’ endpoint, available now for public consumption. Like for like functionality is defined as: “for any given game, software, or hardgood SKU, display the products most like it, ordered by the number of product attributes that match’.” Read more

Triplestores are Database Management Systems (DBMS) for data modeled using RDF. Unlike Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS), which store data in relations (or tables) and are queried using SQL, triplestores store RDF triples and are queried using SPARQL.

A key feature of many triplestores is the ability to do inference. It is important to note that a DBMS typically offers the capacity to deal with concurrency, security, logging, recovery, and updates, in addition to loading and storing data. Not all Triplestores offer all these capabilities (yet).

Triplestore Implementations

Triplestores can be broadly classified in three types categories: Native triplestores, RDBMS-backed triplestores and NoSQL triplestores. Read more

Kendall Clark recently discussed what users can expect from Stardog next. Clark wrote, “The most pressing need in Stardog is support for SPARQL 1.1. We got stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea—trying to push the 1.0 release before the SPARQL Working Group was completely finished with the SPARQL 1.1 spec. We were motivated to avoid reimplementing any parts of SPARQL 1.1 because the spec shifted. So we decided SPARQL 1.10 for the Stardog 1.0 release. Then we told everyone that SPARQL 1.1 would be the highest priority item for the post-1.0 release cycle. And so it’s been.” Read more

C&P has released an update to Stardog, a NoSQL graph database. The article states, “C&P LLC, the company behind Stardog, today announced the release of Stardog 1.0.2. Stardog is a NoSQL graph database based on W3C semantic web standards: SPARQL, RDF, and OWL. Stardog is a key component in Linked Data-based information integration at Fortune 500 enterprises and governments around the world. The new release follows closely on last month’s launch of Stardog 1.0. The 1.0.2 release includes Stardog Community, a free version of Stardog for community use in academia, non-profit, and related sectors. Stardog is being used by customers in the areas of government, aerospace, financial, intelligence, defense, and at consumer-oriented startups.” Read more

Clark & Parsia’s Stardog lightweight RDF database is moving into release candidate 1.0 mode just in time for next week’s upcoming Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco next week. The product’s been stable and useable for awhile now, but a 1.0 nomenclature still carries weight with a good number of IT buyers.

The focus for the product, says cofounder and managing principal Kendall Clark, is to be optimized for what he says is the fat part of the market – and that’s not the part that is dealing with a trillion RDF triples. “Most people and organizations don’t need to scale to trillions of anything,” though scaling up, and up, and up, is where most of Clark & Parsia’s competitors have focused their attention, he says. “We’ve seen a significant percentage of what people are doing with semantic technology and most applications are not at a billion triples today.” Take as an example Clark & Parsia’s customer, NASA, which built an expertise location system based on semantic technology that today is still not more than 20 million triples. “You might say that’s a little toy but not if you are at NASA and need defined experts, it is a real, valuable thing and we see this all the time,” he says.

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“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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For all of you Java developers out there, Clark&Parsia has released an initial integration between Stardog and Spring. The Stardog website states, “Spring is a platform to build and run enterprise applications in Java. Stardog’s Spring support makes life easier for enterprise developers who need to work with Semantic Web technology—including RDF, SPARQL, and OWL—by way of Stardog. The Spring for Stardog source code is available on Github. A more feature-full version of will be available in Stardog Enterprise Edition.” Read more

Is your enterprise content management system the place where your information goes to die? It doesn’t have to be that way.

At the SemTech conference in June, Kendall Clark of Clark & Parsia will formally launch Spanner and Stardog, the former of which is already in use at NASA and the latter of which will be entering private beta mode in the next couple of weeks. Spanner takes semantics to ECM, to help enterprises make the pivot from unstructured to semi-structured and structured information management affordable, useful and valuable, Clark says.

Stardog is its RDF database aimed at the high-value, lower-dataset size of the market, and Spanner will be able to utilize it. Alternately, organizations that already have an existing commitment to an RDF database can continue to employ that in conjunction with Spanner.

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