Franz Tech Corner News
April, 2013
In this issue
- Free Webcast: Gruff Version 5 - Tips and Tricks to become a Power User - 10:00 AM Pacific, Wednesday, April 24th
- Tech Corner: The importance of regular updating
- European Lisp Symposium (ELS'13) - Madrid - June 1-4
- Gruff v5 - Now Available!
- Recorded Webcast: Graph Search Using Ontologies and Content Intelligence - from March 6th
- Practical Semantic Web - Common Lisp Edition
- Training Schedule
Free Webcast: Gruff Version 5 - Tips and Tricks to become a Power User
10:00 AM Pacific, Wednesday, April 24th
The free-form nature of Graph style data offers a lot of flexibility for connecting data, but that freedom can also make it more challenging to find interesting patterns or simply navigate through your data. It has become typical for RDF data sets to contain thousands of classes and relationship types, making it hard to even formulate the analytics and queries you want to perform.
Gruff, a visual analytics and discovery tool, was developed by Franz to specifically address these Graph data challenges in large data sets. Gruff lets you intelligently explore graphs in multiple views:
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The new Gruff v5 uniquely offers users a powerful capability to mark an interesting visual pattern in the Graphical View and convert that automatically into a textual SPARQL or Prolog query. This query code generator operating in conjunction with new zoom in - out controls on Gruff's large graph visualization engine provides users with an unmatched graph discovery tool.
Join us for this webcast training session to learn how to:
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Gruff, a free tool, is simple to install and provides an easy on-ramp for non-technical users to engage the Semantic Web. Join us for this one hour training session.
To register for this webinar, see https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/609916178
Tech Corner: The importance of regular updating
Updating Allegro CL means getting and applying available patches for your version and platform. Patches are posted when they become available. Several tools included with Allegro CL assist in updating the product. Updates are not automatic, although (unless you turn them off) you may get automatic reminders that an update is suggested.
Updating involves two steps: downloading available patches and rebuilding images. Patches cannot always simply be loaded into a Lisp image, since (among other reasons) modified functions might be compiled inline in the existing image (and thus will not be changed) and modified macros will not replace compiled calls. Using in-Lisp tools to download patches therefore requires (at some point) exiting from Lisp and running a separate program. Or you can run a different program (outside Lisp) which both finds and downloads relevant patches and rebuilds images.
Why update? Updating is recommended unless you have a stable application and no time to verify its stability with the new patches (such as a demo to backers this afternoon). Patches can, of course, introduce problems. This can happen in two ways:
One, the patch can contain an error (and so introduce a bug) or can interact badly with your code (by slowing down some heavily used feature). The patch, by correcting code might cause your code to fail because your code depended on the uncorrected behavior (see the full article for an example).
Number two is particularly dicey for us at Franz and we often delay such changes until releases but sometimes consider the change important enough to release the patch anyway. In those cases, the release notes are always updated to note the behavior change.
So, it is very important to test your application after applying patches. If you have difficulty with a patch, note that you can remove it.
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.
.Gruff v5 - Now Available!
New Features include:
- Gruff has a new spring layout algorithm that it uses for larger visual graphs. It is much faster for larger graphs than the original constraint-based algorithm, though it does not prevent nodes from overlapping links. The new option "Visual Graph Options | Spring Layout Options | Minimum Nodes for Spring Layout" controls when the layout automatically switches between the two algorithms. Other new options on that same child menu control the spring layout behavior.
- During a spring layout you can press the zero key to toggle animation on and off. That allows letting a large layout run at full speed and then turning animation on to see how far it has progressed.
- Several new zooming commands on the Layout menu of the graph view provide alternate views of the larger visual graphs that can now be handled by the spring layout algorithm. Node and link labels are not drawn when zoomed out, though they do appear in tooltips. Full mouse and keyboard functionality is still available on zoomed-out nodes and links.
- The mouse wheel now performs zooming in the graph view, rather than scrolling as before, though the new option "Visual Graph Options | Layout Options | Mouse Wheel Zooms" could be used to revert to the scrolling behavior.
- The new command "Layout | Update Layout Vigorously" is an incremental layout that is better at untangling crossed chains of nodes.
- The new option "Visual Graph Options | Layout Options | Maximum Nodes for Animation" avoids animating layouts when there are too many nodes and links for animation to be fast enough for interactive use.
- Three options on the "Visual Graph Options | Inclusion Options" child menu now have much larger defaults because the new spring layout can handle larger graphs. The new defaults will override any custom values that you may have set. These options are "Number of Total Links for Warning", "Number of Total Links for Abort", and "Number of Links from One Node for Warning".
- Displaying the results of completed queries is faster.
- The new option "Query Options | Exclude Orphans from Visual Graphs" controls whether orphan nodes may appear in a visual graph that's generated from a query.
- Nodes in the graph view can now display pixmaps, if triples are added to the store for that. If the UPI of a node names a pixmap file on the local machine, then the graph view will display the pixmap for the node, rather than a text label. The UPI string can be either an absolute path string or a relative path string that will be merged with "Global Options | Miscellaneous | Document Base Folder" to find the actual file to use.
- The various commands for loading triples now allow you to select multiple files at once in the file selection dialog (when they're in the same folder).
- The new spring layout now handles the existing predicate direction constraints, such as forcing all subClassOf links to point upward as in a tree graph.
- You can now set or clear the layout direcction constraint for a predicate from the pop-up menu in the legend pane, rather than only from the "Visual Graph Options | Layout Options" menu.
- Highlighted nodes in the visual graph (see Select | Highlight Selected Node or Link) are now drawn in a different way to make them easier to spot, with a thick blue border rather than a light red background color.
Many other improvements and fixes have been included in this major new release. For additional information, see the release noteshere.
Recorded Webcast: Graph Search Using Ontologies and Content Intelligence - from 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.
View the recording of this webinar 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 - June 5, 12, and 19
Lisp Programming Series Level II: Specialized Components of Lisp - May 8, 15, and 22
For additional information and to register, see here.
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