Paula Gregorowicz
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Semantic web software vendor TopQuadrant on Monday announced the release of TopBraid Live™ 2.0, a semantic application deployment platform for the enterprise designed to simplify the creation of web services to a “click and connect” process.

It marks the start of the movement of the semantic web out of the halls of academic exercise and into the hands of power users in the business. What makes this announcement significant is that it demonstrates the strategic direction of the semantic web — using a standards-based platform to bridge the gap between strategic goals, business processes, and technology.

The functionality of TopBraid Live is based on a combination of SPARQLMotion Web Services and a Flex API.

SPARQLMotion is a visual scripting language that allows power users within the business to create semantic web applications. End users can integrate data sources, run queries on the combined data, and create information mash-ups and reports without assistance from the IT department. SPARQLMotion is fully compliant with and utilizes the W3C standard SPARQL.

Flex API is a client-side API that can be used to deliver internet applications using Adobe’s platform-independent Flash Player. It provides out-of-the-box components to display and edit semantically enabled information.

TopBraid Live allows users to make existing data available to semantic search engines such as Yahoo! SearchMonkey.

TopQuadrant also announced that the TopBraid Suite™ now offers integration with Oracle 11g. This allows companies to build semantic applications that access the native Resource Description Framework (RDF) storage capabilities within Oracle Spatial, an option to Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition.

In addition, as a part of the Oracle PartnerNetwork, TopQuadrant developed an Oracle rules editor that enables business users and domain experts to define the business rules and application reasoning within a semantic application, without having to use SQL.

Standards such as RDF and OWL serve as the foundation for the semantic web. This integration marks the first application that can leverage Oracle’s RDF Data Model as a scalable, secure and reliable RDF management platform, TopQuadrant says.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to adoption of semantic web technology, TopQuadrant officials say, is that there is no good standards-based enterprise platform that can connect to various, best practices data stores. “TopQuadrant is building that very platform,” say company COO Robert Coyne and chief scientist Dean Allemang.

TopQuadrant officials say the company’s strategy is to invest heavily in standards-based technologies and seek to make the semantic web accessible to both business and technical users.

“Making it relevant so it can support users in business processes” is how Coyne and Allemang explained it during a recent phone briefing.

While TopQuadrant has been around since 2001 as a pure semantic web consulting firm, the company recently hired Dr. Jeremy Carroll as chief product architect. Carroll has contributed to many semantic web standards from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and was the lead architect in the creation of Jena 2.0, an open source Semantic Web framework developed by Hewlett Packard Research Labs.

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