Franz Tech Corner News
February, 2013
In this issue
- Free Webcast: Graph Search Using Ontologies and Content Intelligence - 10:00 AM Pacific, Wednesday, March 6th
- Tech Corner: Windows version now uses Unicode (and all IDE users should update!)
- Tech Corner: Support Questions of General Interest from 2012
- European Lisp Symposium (ELS'13) - Madrid - June 1-4
- AllegroGraph 4.10 - Now Available
- New Gruff release, version 4.1.5 - Now Available
- Recorded Webcast: A Semantic Platform for Tracking Entities in Real Time
- Practical Semantic Web - Common Lisp Edition
- Training Schedule
Free Webcast: Graph Search Using Ontologies and Content Intelligence - 10:00 AM Pacific, Wednesday, March 6th
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Speakers: Jan Aasman, Franz & Matthieu Jonglez, Smartlogic
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Graph Search, as recently popularized by Facebook, is also relevant to enterprise information management. Companies are looking to Graph solutions that facilitate understanding of the "connectedness" of their data and as a means to manage the complexity of relationships between elements of information. The Semantic Web has long promised the value of "The Graph" and offers a world of shared information usable beyond the boundaries of legacy applications, inflexible content silos and rigid organizational boundaries. Add in the volume, velocity and variety that is Big Data and we are now hitting stride for semantic technologies to deliver on the promise.
Using real client examples, this webinar demonstrates how organizations use two types of semantic application, namely Content Intelligence and Graph Databases to organize enterprise knowledge. There are many ways to use these technologies but one that is gaining momentum is to semantically classify unstructured documents using ontologies in order to draw new data connections and meaning from very large information sets.
In this talk we will demonstrate two projects where a combination of SKOS/OWL based models, entity extraction, rule based classification, search engines and an RDF Graph Database are used to create a semantic retrieval engine for unstructured documents that delivers new insights to the user.
The business benefits of these projects have included faster development of products; more rapid time to market; improved and more efficient maintenance procedures; new ways of working with information to service customers; enhanced data security and protection; lower cost adherence to compliance tasks.
Register to attend this webinar here
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.Tech Corner: Windows version now uses Unicode (and all IDE users should update!)
The Windows version of Allegro CL now uses Unicode (two bytes per character) rather than ANSI (one byte per character). This provided much more flexibility in language use and locales in Common Graphics applications. However, a coding bug uncovered after the release necessitates that all users of the IDE on Windows update with new patches using sys:update-allegro or the Download Patches dialog in the IDE.
For the full article, see here
Tech Corner: Support Questions of General Interest from 2012
From time to time, we report on customer questions and problem reports which might be of interest to users in general. Here are some things that came up during 2012:
- How do I get rid of #'s in trace or debug output?
- How can RETURN be a special operator? It is not in the list of special operators in the ANSI standard.
- I want my own version of OPEN to be used by WITH-OPEN-FILE. Can I do that?
- I accidentally defined a function with a keyword argument repeated, but got no warning or error, and strange behavior.
For the full article, see here.
European Lisp Symposium (ELS'13) - Madrid - June 1-4
The main theme of the 2013 European Lisp Symposium is on the use of these languages with respect to the current grand challenges: big tables, open data, semantic web, network programming, discovery, robustness, runtime failures, etc. The European Lisp Symposium 2013 solicits the submission of papers with these specific themes in mind, alongside the more traditional tracks which have appeared in the past editions.
For full conference information and to register, see here.
.AllegroGraph 4.10 - Now Available
New features include:
- UPDATED - The Top Braid Composer Plugin, TBC version 4
- OWL 2 RL Materializer - Generates triples by applying a set of rules to the current triples in the triple store and then places the resulting triples back in the triple store. For example, RDF-inferred triples can be generated before runtime rather than at runtime.
- New Webview Query Screen and Graph View (Beta) - In WebView next to the Documentation menu is a link to "WebView Beta" a new UI for Query and Graph. All existing features of WebView Query are implemented.
- The Java client can now be configured to have sessions use the main server port rather than a dedicated port
- Improved Memory Management Functionality
- SPARQL 1.1 Query Improvements
- Support for Sesame 2.6.8 for the Java client.
- MongoDB Integration - Presentation: MongoDB meets the Semantic Web
- SOLR Interface for free text indexes, integrated with the SPARQL 1.1 query engine. View the webcast: Making Solr Search Smarter using RDF
- SPIN support (SPARQL Inferencing Notation). The SPIN API allows you to define a function in terms of a SPARQL query and then call that function in other SPARQL queries. These SPIN functions can appear in FILTERs and can also be used to compute values in assignment and select expressions.
See the full list of new features and improvements here.
New Gruff release, version 4.1.5 - Now Available
New Features include:
- There is a new outline view for browsing and editing linked nodes as an indented outline. It is especially useful for viewing hierarchies of nodes such as those using rdfs:subClassOf or skos:narrower predicates, and editing them by shifting nodes around (perhaps while adding new nodes as well).
- Chinese Language Enhancements and numerous optimizations.
Many other improvements and fixes have been included in this new release. For additional information, see the release notes here.
Recorded Webcast: A Semantic Platform for Tracking Entities in Real Time
As presented at Semtech SF, NY, and London
Having engaged several Fortune 500 companies with projects to develop Semantic Technology solutions we have identified several consistent requirements that have become the foundation for successful deployments of Semantic Technologies.
The overarching pattern that we see in these companies can best be described as real time entity tracking in order to perform real time business analytics. Typical entities are students, telephone customers, credit cards or insurance policies.
We identified and built out four components as the basis of our Semantic Technology Projects. Component one is an ETL system that takes data from various input streams and transforms the data into events, encoded as RDF triples, that go into a publish subscribe queue. To facilitate this we created a number of plugins for the open source ETL tool Talend to provide an R2RML mapping from data into triples. The second component is a forward chaining/backward chaining rule system that takes events out of the queue and combines it with the already existing knowledge about a particular entity and generates new knowledge. For some applications we see more than 10,000 triples per entity. Rules need to be able to deal with a new event in a fraction of a second. The third component is a machine learning component that is trained to generate predictions based on the features of a particular entity (for example: what is the customer going to call about when calling the call center). These predictions are again coded as individual triples. Finally, the fourth component is a reporting system that allows us to do real time analysis over all existing entities.
Watch this recorded webcast here.
.Practical Semantic Web - Applications, Common Lisp Edition
This new book is intended to be a practical guide for using RDF data in information processing, linked data, and semantic web applications using both the AllegroGraph commercial product and the Sesame open source project.
For additional information and to purchase, see here.
Training Schedule
BECOME 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 - April 10, 17, and 24
Lisp Programming Series Level II: Specialized Components of Lisp - March 6, 13, and 20
For additional information and to register, see here.
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