Monday, November 9, 2015

Franz Inc. (+ Lisp Graph) Tech Corner - November 2015



Tech Corner News
November, 2015

In this issue

Webcast - "Enriching the Property Graph with Relationship Objects" - November 18 - 10 AM Pacific
supergraph
In many graph applications we find the link between two nodes is actually a complex object in itself. Property Graph Databases (i.e. Neo4j) try to solve this by putting attribute/values on the edges between nodes but unfortunately this is far too limited as the values cannot be nodes themselves.
Semantic Graph Databases solve this by creating 'Relationship Objects' between nodes. In our presentation we will describe four use cases where the Property Graphҳ shortcomings were solved by using Relationship Objects. An online banking application, a fraud detection application for a European tax office, a machine learning application in healthcare and the CrunchBase investment database.
Working with these 'Relationship Objects' is very efficient because we employed a new 'Super Graph' pattern that summarizes connections between nodes in such a way that even in graphs with large branching factors we still can perform super fast search.
Another advantage of the relationship objects is that it makes it far more straightforward to interactively explore large graph space in an aesthetically pleasing way in Gruff, Franz's advanced graph visualization tool.
Register for this webcast here.

In case you missed it, ACL 10 Now Available
ACL 10.0 splashscreen
October 7, 2015 Franz Inc., an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and leading supplier of Common Lisp (CL) development tools and Semantic Graph Database technology, today announced Allegro CL 10, which includes key performance enhancements now available within the most effective system for developing and deploying applications to solve the problems in the field of Artificial Intelligence. "Demand for faster, more intelligent and scalable applications is increasing with the Big Data onslaught that is impacting applications in traditional AI industries like National Defense, but also in Life Sciences, Manufacturing and Financial Analytics," said Dr. Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz Inc.

To read the full press release, see here.

Tech Corner Article: Package alternate names in Allegro CL 10.0
package

When a symbol must be package qualified when printed, the system must decide whether to use the package name or one of its nicknames. In earlier releases, Allegro CL allowed users to choose between the name and the principal (first in the list) nickname, but that method turned out to have problems. Starting in release 10.0, users may choose exactly which among the name and all the nicknames should be used, with the choice being made per package rather than globally.



Read the full Tech Corner article here.

Tech Corner Article: Support for Alpha Blending on Windows
Alpha Blending

Alpha blending is the process of combining a translucent foreground color with a background color, thereby producing a new blended color. Common Graphics on Windows in Allegro CL 10.0 supports alpha blending.




Read the full Tech Corner article here.

Gruff v6.0 Now Available
gruff screen shot
New Features Include:
  • New Screen Layout Options
  • You can now quickly invoke certain commands by clicking the corners of nodes in the graph view. Small icons will appear for the commands to indicate when you're in the right spot. You can right-click a corner to globally assign a different command to that corner. See the new "Visual Graph Options | Node Corner Clicks" child menu.
  • For advanced users who are comfortable writing lisp code, there is a new view for evaluating lisp expressions to control Gruff programmatically. See View | Lisp Evaluation View.
  • Small improvements and fixes have been made to the new tree layout algorithm.
  • "Link | Display Linked Nodes from an Outline" (formerly "from a Tree") now positions its dialog beside the selected node. You can cancel the dialog quickly by moving the mouse cursor out of the dialog, and say OK quickly by right-clicking anywhere in the dialog.
  • The new command "Select | Reselect a Recent Node" lets you choose a recently-selected node from a pop-up menu to reselect it. This can be handy for then applying a command to it with a keyboard shortcut.
  • The query view's "Create Visual Graph" button finds more triples to display in queries that have UNION or OPTIONAL groups, in the default mode where "Query Options | Include More Triples in Visual Graphs" is not enabled.
  • Zooming with the mouse (when "Visual Graph Options | Layout Options | Mouse Wheel Zooms" is enabled) will now center the zooming around the mouse cursor position.
  • A few commands on the File menu have been moved onto a new Miscellaneous child menu.
  • When using "Link | Display a Linked Node from Menus" and choosing the All choice when selecting the predicate, triples for the rdfs:label predicate (or any custom label predicates) will no longer be added to the display, because the label is shown on the node itself already.
  • On the old 3.3 version of AllegroGraph, the store-opening dialog no longer has widgets for specifying a remote host and a port, because Gruff on AG 3.3 is normally used only with the server that's built into Gruff, and so those widgets were more confusing than useful.
  • When sorting query results by one of the columns, numeric values will now be sorted numerically rather than alphanumerically like other values.

For additional information, see the Gruff Documentation

SmartData Conference Video - "Healthcare Analytics with a Smart Data Lake"
Logo
Montefiore Medical Center in collaboration with Franz, Intel, Cloudera and Cisco created a scalable and extensible Learning Healthcare System platform for accountable care and precision medicine initiatives. We call the underlying Hadoop based big data platform a "Semantic Data Lake" (SDL).
The SDL integrates complex information and analytic requirements including:
  • Basic science
  • Clinical
  • Population
  • Community
  • Environmental
  • Behavioral
  • Wellness research data
The SDL links and fuses domain specific models (ontologies), biomedical terminologies and taxonomy systems, and other contextual metadata with ERP data, Electronic Medical Records, and medical device data in massive volumes. The SDL provides a uniform, semantically integrated, self-descriptive information repository based on graph representations of multi-source, heterogeneous data (including free text clinical narratives). We expect to grow this platform to 4 trillion edges at the end of 2015.
Montefiore uses this platform for scalable knowledge-based analytics for classification, pattern recognition, predictive modeling, and simulations. We will demonstrate how we can create smart applications for decision support, fraud detection, risk management, personalized care management, signal detection and notifications.
See here to watch the presentation video.
Note: Registration is required to gain access to the conference videos.

Recent Articles about Franz - AllegroGraph 


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Training Schedule
Gruff

LabBECOME ALLEGRO CERTIFIED - To obtain your Allegro CL Certification enroll in our LIVE Program which offers developers an opportunity to learn and improve their Lisp programming skills from the comfort of their home or office while interacting with the Franz instructor.
Lisp Programming Series Level I: Basic Lisp Essentials - February 10, 17, 24
Lisp Programming Series Level II: Specialized Components of Lisp - December 2, 9, and 16
For additional information and to register, see here.

Subscribe to Franz RSS feeds: RSS Feeds

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Franz (+ Lisp Graph) Tech Corner - October 2015



Lisp Tech Corner News
October, 2015

In this issue

Allegro CL 10 Now Available
ACL 10.0 splashscreen
October 6, 2015 Franz Inc., an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and leading supplier of Common Lisp (CL) development tools and Semantic Graph Database technology, today announced Allegro CL 10, which includes key performance enhancements now available within the most effective system for developing and deploying applications to solve the problems in the field of Artificial Intelligence. "Demand for faster, more intelligent and scalable applications is increasing with the Big Data onslaught that is impacting applications in traditional AI industries like National Defense, but also in Life Sciences, Manufacturing and Financial Analytics," said Dr. Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz Inc.

To read the full press release, see here.

Free ACL 10 Express Edition - Download Now
ACL Logo
An updated version of Allegro 9.0 Express (our free version of Allegro CL 9.0) is now available. It has a license expiration date of February 1, 2016 (the older version expired on September 15, 2015). It also has all updates and patches as of September, 2015. You can just download the new license file from that site, if preferred. Its name is devel.lic and you should copy it into the Allegro CL 9.0 Express directory overwriting the current license. Also, the 10.0 Express version will be available soon.


Express users should download the new version starting from here.

New Garbage Collection Features in Allegro CL 10.0
Garbage Collection
Allegro CL 10.0 has a new garbage collection implementation. The basic design is unchanged: the heap is divided into two newspaces and an indeterminate number of oldspaces. Regular scavenges clear garbage out of newspace using a stop and copy algorithm, and objects that survive a specified (initially 4) scavenges are tenured to oldspace. Oldspaces are gc'ed during global gc's only, using a mark and sweep algorithm.
New in 10.0 are:
  1. The garbage collector can use multiple processors to perform its work, if they are available.
  2. The garbage collector has better information on pointers on the stack so objects which are actually dead can be gc'ed.
  3. The garbage collector can optionally skip portions of a global garbage collection if the space recovered is too small.
See the Tech Corner Article for further details.

Windows Touchscreen Support in Allegro CL 10.0
touch-screen
Common Graphics, the windowing system associated with Allegro CL, provides touchscreen support on the Windows platform in Allegro CL 10.0. Touchscreen gestures were added to Windows in Windows 7 and are supported in subsequent Windows releases (such as 8 and 10). The Common Graphics facility corresponds closely to the Microsoft API and uses similar names for functions and arguments, though adpated for use in Common Graphics and Lisp.


See the Tech Corner Article for further details.

Franz in the News 



"Common Lisp Programming for Artificial Intelligence" training class to be offered by Dr. Seiji Koide in Tokyo
lambda
Seiji Koide, Ph.D., offers a 3-day training class titled "Common Lisp Programming for Artificial Intelligence" in Tokyo, Japan. The seminar will be based on his upcoming book with the same title.

Please visit http://peatix.com/event/115092 for details.

Follow us on Google Plus, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube 

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Training Schedule
Gruff

LabBECOME ALLEGRO CERTIFIED - To obtain your Allegro CL Certification enroll in our LIVE Program which offers developers an opportunity to learn and improve their Lisp programming skills from the comfort of their home or office while interacting with the Franz instructor.
Lisp Programming Series Level I: Basic Lisp Essentials - November 4, 11, and 18
Lisp Programming Series Level II: Specialized Components of Lisp - December 2, 9, and 16
For additional information and to register, see here.

Subscribe to Franz RSS feeds: RSS Feeds

Monday, August 31, 2015

Allegro CL Free Express Edition - License Extension

We anticipate releasing an Express v10 before the license expires but in order to have a smooth transition we have extended the v9 license for a few months.

http://franz.com/products/express/

Updated license file for Allegro CL Free Express Edition

The current Express license expires on 2015-09-14. You can now download a new devel.lic which expires on 2016-02-01.

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Franz (+ Lisp Graph) Tech Corner - July 2015



In this issue


Allegro CL - Beta v10 - Program in process, runs until July 31
ACL 10.0 splashscreen

ACL 10.0 New Features

  1. Parallel Global Garbage Collection
  2. New Payback Analysis for optimized Global Garbage Collection
  3. Precise Garbage Collection of stack slots for fast memory recycling
  4. Touchscreen and Alpha blending in Common Graphics
  5. API generator builds Lisp interface functions from information in Java class libraries
  6. Source Level debugging improvements
  7. Plus over 700 enhancements and updates
Users interested in becoming beta testers should contact info@franz.com for more information.


451 Research Group Covers Franz
451 Logo

Franz pitches 'semantic data lakes' to combine linked data and Hadoop

The company might be best known for the semantic Web applications of its AllegroGraph database, but it sees an opportunity to help enterprises make sense of their data stored in Hadoop with what it is calling 'semantic data lakes.'
To read more, see here


Bloor Research Positions AllegroGraph as a "Champion"
Bloor Logo
May 5, 2015 Franz, Inc., the leading supplier of Semantic Graph Database technology, today announced its flagship product, AllegroGraph, has been named a Champion by Bloor Research in its recent Graph Database Market Update report. AllegroGraph is a high performance Semantic Graph Database that enables analytics by leveraging the W3C industry standards.Graph databases are skyrocketing in popularity and have grown by 400% in the past two years, according to a recent DBMS ranking by DB-Engines...


Join us at the Smart Data and NoSQL Now! Conferences
NoSQL-Smart Data Logo
Franz Inc.’s CEO, Dr. Jans Aasman, will present at the 2015 NoQL Now! conference this August in San Jose, CA. The fifth annual NoSQL Now! Conference is the largest vendor-neutral forum focused on NoSQL (Not Only SQL) technologies. The conference is intended for every enterprise looking for better, faster and cheaper solutions to manage its growing databases and data stores. The topic of his talk will be "Spark and SPARQL for the Intelligent Data Lake".
He will also be presenting at the colocated Smart Data Conference. The Smart Data Conference is designed to accommodate all levels of technical understanding, and brings together emerging disciplines that are focused on more intelligent information gathering and analysis. The topic of his talk will be "Healthcare Analytics with a Smart Data Lake".


Recent Articles about Franz
Recent articles



Follow us on Google Plus, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube 

Google+
Twitter



Training Schedule
Gruff

LabBECOME ALLEGRO CERTIFIED - To obtain your Allegro CL Certification enroll in our LIVE Program which offers developers an opportunity to learn and improve their Lisp programming skills from the comfort of their home or office while interacting with the Franz instructor.
Lisp Programming Series Level I: Basic Lisp Essentials - September 9, 16, and 23
Lisp Programming Series Level II: Specialized Components of Lisp - September 9, 16, and 23
For additional information and to register, see here.

Subscribe to Franz RSS feeds: RSS Feeds

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Franz (+ Lisp Graph) Tech Corner - April 2015



In this issue


Allegro CL 10.0 - Call for Beta Testers
ACL 10.0 splashscreen

ACL 10.0 New Features

  1. Parallel Global Garbage Collection
  2. New Payback Analysis for optimized Global Garbage Collection
  3. Precise Garbage Collection of stack slots for fast memory recycling
  4. Touchscreen and Alpha blending in Common Graphics
  5. API generator builds Lisp interface functions from information in Java class libraries
  6. Source Level debugging improvements
  7. Plus over 700 enhancements and updates
Users interested in becoming beta testers should contact info@franz.com for more information.


Franz Senior Scientist, Ahmon Dancy to Present at the 2015 European Lisp Symposium in London, UK
ELS Logo
Franz Senior Scientist, Ahmon Dancy will be presenting "Escaping the Heap" - 12:30, April 21 at the 2015 European Lisp Symposium in London.
Common Lisp implementations provide great automatic memory management of data structures. These data structures are allocated from a memory area called the "heap". However, there are times when heap allocation is inadequate to satisfy the needs of the application. For example, sometimes data structures need to be persistent or shareable amongst separate processes. In these cases, alternatives to using the heap must be considered.
In his talk, Ahmon will explore the motivations for out-of-heap data structures. He will discuss some of the out-of-heap data structures that we've created in the course of developing our database product, such as lists, hash tables, and arrays. He will describe the tools and mechanisms that we used to implement them, including memory-mapped files, foreign structs, aligned pointers and direct memory accesses. Finally Ahmon will discuss the downsides of out-of-heap data structures and the constant struggle between abstractions and performance.
For additional information, see here


Press Release: Franz, Inc. Announces Allegro NFS Server v6.0
Allegro NFS for Windows Logo
April 2, 2015 Franz, Inc. today announces the availability of version 6.0 of its NFS Server for Windows, the market leader for NFS Server products. "Allegro NFS Server for Windows was inspired by our dissatisfaction with current free and commercial NFS servers available on the market and the incredible technical difficulties we faced in configuring them on Windows", states Franz's CEO Jans Aasman. Allegro NFS Server for Windows was designed for all current versions of the Windows operating system, and is very easy and flexible to configure.

Allegro NFS has become a standard for many Fortune 500 customers such as:
  • Boeing
  • Teledyne
  • Disney
  • Raytheon
  • NASA
  • Philips
  • Siemens
  • IBM
  • Alcoa
  • Dupont
  • GE
  • Xerox
  • Ericsson
  • Seagate
  • US Department of Defence
To view the entire press release, see here


European Lisp Symposium, April 20-21, Goldsmiths University, London, UK
ELS Logo
The purpose of the European Lisp Symposium is to provide a forum for the discussion and dissemination of all aspects of design, implementationand application of any of the Lisp and Lisp-inspired dialects, including Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, AutoLisp, ISLISP, Dylan, Clojure, ACL2, ECMAScript, Racket, SKILL, Hop and so on. We encourage everyone interested in Lisp to participate.



For additional conference information, see here


Press Release: Franz Receives 2015 Best Semantic Graph Database Award
Franz Award
March 10, 2015 Franz Inc. has been selected for the 2015 Best of Oakland Award in the Graph Database Technologies category by the Oakland Award Program.
Each year, the Oakland Award Program identifies companies that we believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their business category. Interest in Graph Databases exploded in 2014, according to DB-engines.com. Franz Inc. is a leader in this sector and well positioned to capitalize on the momentum in this market going into 2015.


To view the entire press release, see here


Recorded Webcast: Maximizing New Multi-dimensional Indexing for Complex Location Aware Applications with AllegroGraph v5.0
Nd
With the recent release of AllegroGraph v5.0's unique multi-dimensional indexing capabilities, Data Scientists are better able to answer complex, real world questions which today require the fusion of data in many dimensions.
AllegroGraph was the first Graph Database to offer advanced temporal and geospatial libraries. With this latest release, AllegroGraph again leads the industry in advanced event based data processing for customers in healthcare, telecom, agriculture, financial and intelligence applications. Although the industries are diverse, these AllegroGraph customers are driven by a common need to better answer complex, real world questions which today require the fusion of data in many dimensions.
Watch this webcast to learn more about optimizing multidimensional queries like the following: 
Which geographic areas with an altitude greater than 500m and less than 2500m had a reduction in crop yield in August and which also had high humidity for at least 5 consecutive days in the month of April.
To view this webcast, see here


Follow us on Google Plus, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube 

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Twitter



Training Schedule
Gruff

LabBECOME ALLEGRO CERTIFIED - To obtain your Allegro CL Certification enroll in our LIVE Program which offers developers an opportunity to learn and improve their Lisp programming skills from the comfort of their home or office while interacting with the Franz instructor.
Lisp Programming Series Level I: Basic Lisp Essentials - June 3, 10, and 17
Lisp Programming Series Level II: Specialized Components of Lisp - May 6, 13, and 20
For additional information and to register, see here.