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.”
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.
Semantic Universe and Cerebra have joined forces to create the Semantic Universe Network, a vibrant online community and communications hub for the global semantic technology marketplace. The Semantic Universe Network will be the professional and educational resource for the people, companies, editorial content, events, products, advertising, research and initiatives within the high-growth semantics sector. The Network will be developed and deployed on a sophisticated semantic application platform to facilitate the highest level of user engagement, contextual relevancy and editorial resource matching.
Thomson Reuters has revealed enterprise options for its Open Calais web service. Open Calais sends website content to the service, which scans it for keywords and patterns, and meta-tags it automatically. The service goes beyond simple entity identification, and offers semantic metadata by identifying facts and events in context. Open Calais was well received at its launch as a step forward for the semantic web, and Thomson Reuters started developing a commercial version. It can be typically applied in newspapers to automatically create tag clouds around different articles to provide a related article capability.
On The Christian Science Monitor, Chris Gaylord says that till now, Ask Jeeves? search engine, which had branded itself as the web’s trusty maître d’ where you can type in your query in the form of a question – and Jeeves suggested where you could find an answer, was the best way to find your answer. But now, the Powerset startup website actually reads what you wrote. The search engine encourages you to write the way you speak, and then uses your phrasing to search entries in Wikipedia. Powerset is an early player in what’s called “semantic search” and Gaylord tells surfers to expect a lot more of these natural-language options to come.