This post was written by Liz Brady
Stone Bond Technologies has announced the expansion of its breakthrough AppComm product with the addition of Remote Function Call (RFC) support for SAP inter-operability. AppComm provides re-useable, self-guiding, drag-and-drop connectivity to move data to and from legacy applications, without programming. AppComm makes it easy for IT personnel and system integrators to move information between SAP and business processes, web services, “software-as-a-service” and business intelligence applications. AppComm from Stone Bond Technologies makes building re-usable connectivity a simple “drag-and-drop” process.
OpenLink Software announces immediate availability of the Cloud Edition of Virtuoso, its industry-acclaimed Universal Server: an integrated, standards-compliant server platform that includes a built-in SQL RDBMS, RDF DBMS (Quad Store), Content Management Server, and Web Application Server, amongst other features. The new product release leverages the solution packaging and deployment prowess of the Amazon EC2 cloud-computing platform by delivering a pre-configured and tightly tuned edition of Virtuoso on a Fedora Linux-based Amazon Machine Image (AMI), ready for immediate use (post initialization).
Mozilla is currently leading the major browser vendors in bringing semantics to everyday Web browsing, courtesy of tools built into its upcoming Firefox 3 Web browser. However, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) may not be far behind too. Both the browsers are working to include certain measure of support for microformats — a simple means of categorizing Web content as metadata. Alex Faaborg, Mozilla’s user experience designer, “Firefox 3’s microformats API and support for detecting different types of content inside of RSS feeds are both important steps in the direction of creating a Semantic Web browser.”
A research project funded by the European Union has developed a social semantic desktop that could pave the way to a broader semantic web, digital agency executives may be interested to note. The Nepomuk scheme saw researchers develop a way of helping computer users to better find and organise information on their systems and share this data with a network of users by giving meaning to a range of files through annotation, regardless of their format.
Ahead of Semantic Technology Conference, Powerset announced the public availability of a service that adds a whole new dimension to searching for information from Wikipedia. Whilst much of the functionality has been visible to those granted access to the company’s Powerlabs for some time, the Powerset team has clearly been busy optimizing code and ensuring that the various components work together much better. Powerset places much store by their ability to ‘read and extract meaning’ from a user’s query; and from the resources that they are searching. Although today’s beta is targeted at articles from Wikipedia, Powerset’s ambitions are obviously larger.
5min has announced its VideoSeed semantic syndication platform for instructional and knowledge video programming now reaches more than 110 million unique users a month via its vast network of comprehensive knowledge and information syndication partner sites. 5min pairs brand advertising with tens of thousands of professionally-produced, niche-specific “how-to” titles produced and licensed from hundreds of content partners for semantic delivery via the VideoSeed platform. 5min has closed syndication deals with horizontal sites such as Answers.com, wikiHow, Wikia and Articlesbase as well as vertical sites including Tim Carter’s Ask the Builder, Recipe4Living and Pregnancy.org.
Franz Inc. has released version 3.0 of AllegroGraph, the industry’s first RDF database that combines very efficient geospatial data capabilities, temporal reasoning and social network analytics for storing and querying billions of RDF statements. The demand for new RDF databases is expanding rapidly with the growth of social networks, the emergence of the Semantic Web (3.0) and as companies seek more sophisticated tools to help them take advantage of their existing unstructured knowledge. AllegroGraph offers solutions for customers to address the challenge of storing and combining unstructured and structured data for new Web 3.0 style applications as well as new types of Business Intelligence for the Enterprise. Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz, said
In recent years, rule based technologies have enjoyed remarkable adoption in two areas: (1) Business Rules Processing and (2) Web-Centered Reasoning. The first trend is caused by the software development life cycle. The second trend is related to the Semantic Web and Service-oriented technologies which aim to supplement the Web with a huge repository of cross-referenced, machine-understandable data and processes. For both trends, rules can be used to extract, derive, transform, and integrate information in a platform-independent manner. While early rule engines and environments were complex, expensive to maintain, and not very user friendly, the current generation of rule technology provides enhanced usability, scalability and performance, and is less costly. A general advantage of using rules is that they are usually represented in a platform independent manner, often using XML.