Tech Corner News
November, 2015
In this issue
- Webcast - "Enriching the Property Graph with Relationship Objects" - November 18 - 10 AM Pacific
- In case you missed it, ACL 10 Now Available
- Tech Corner Article: Package alternate names in Allegro CL 10.0
- Tech Corner Article: Support for Alpha Blending on Windows
- Gruff v6.0 Now Available
- SmartData Conference Video
- Recent Articles about Franz - AllegroGraph
- Follow us on Google Plus, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube
- Training Schedule
Webcast - "Enriching the Property Graph with Relationship Objects" - November 18 - 10 AM Pacific
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
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
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 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
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"
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
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 - 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.
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