Companies looking to tap the benefits of the so-called Semantic Web
said its TopBraid Composer 2.0, released today, seamlessly supports multiple
inference (or reasoning) engines and mash-up
The idea behind the Semantic Web is to give data more meaning through the
use of metadata
a particular set of data was collected, and how that data is formatted. Tim
Berners-Lee, creator
of the World Wide Web, has referred to the Semantic Web as being like a great big
database.”
With a commonality or at least understanding of data types, new
applications like mash-ups and knowledge management can be created that link
multiple sources of information. This can be a huge asset to corporations
and other large organization where information sources have evolved from
different silos, explained Dean Allemang, chief technology consultant at
Alexandria, VA-based TopQuadrant.
“A lot of our customers already have some kind of big relational
databases they don’t want to give up, but they also want this merged thing
to happen where everything everywhere knows everything else,” Allemang told
internetnews.com.
The TopBraid Composer 2.0 modeling toolset supports Semantic Web standard
languages RDF/S
Semantic Web applications to be developed with unique, flexible and
user-customizable hybrid reasoning that allows rules, queries and
description logic to be combined to solve significant business problems.
Allemang said one TopQuadrant customer, an engineering firm, estimates it
generates 20,000 new documents a day. “They’re trying to figure out how to
keep up,” said Allemang. “Sure you can use Google or other search engines,
but these are engineering documents that come out of a structured workflow.
A lot of the documents look alike; you have to read three or four paragraphs
in to figure out what’s different.”
But the metadata behind those documents is readily identifiable, and
that’s what an application designed with TopBraid Composer is designed to
look for. TopQuadrant, which started out and continues to offer consulting
services, lists Intel, NASA, General Motors, the FAA and the General
Services Administration among its customers.
Allemang said some universities and other research facilities have come up
with custom and proprietary solutions that address the same problems it’s
trying to solve with a commercial, standards-based offering.
Nova Spivack, CEO and founder of Radar Networks, said TopBraid Composer
is the only commercial-ready ontology design environment that meets the
needs of application developers outside of the research community.
“We tried many other, but a lot of the tools were clunky or had bugs,
they weren’t commercial quality,” said Spivack. “TopBraid Composer gives us
the ability to build and manage highly scalable ontologies while working
with modern capabilities, such as the Eclipse development platform.”
Radar Networks, currently in stealth mode, is building what it describes
as a major new Web 3.0 online service that will bring the Semantic Web to
consumers. “We’re enabling the next generation of social software and
search,” Spivack told internetnews.com.
