News

As a leading semantic technology provider Ontotext is continuously supporting research and technological events in the field over the last 8 years. This spring Ontotext is a sponsor of two major events: 2008 Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose and Linked Data Planet conference in New York.

The 2008 Semantic Technology Conference is the third edition of the strongest technology event in the field, known as SemTech. It will take place between 18 and 22 May in San Jose, gathering all major vendors and the leading experts in semantic technology arena. Ontotext Lab is golden sponsor and will be presented at the vendor exhibition, booth #105. Ontotext representatives will be involved in multiple sessions and activities.

Linked Data Planet 2008 conference is a new event which brings the spirit of Semantic Web-related linked data initiatives to the attention of more than 500 IT decision makers: database and information architects, metadata specialists, enterprise architects, etc. Atanas Kiryakov from Ontotext will give a keynote speech entitled "Scalable Semantics User's Guide". Ontotext will also present its technology on booth #114.

LARKC is a research project with the ambitious mission to develop next generation reasoning approach which allows inference engine to match the scale and requirements of the world wide web. The project officially started on 1st of April, 2008, and will continue until the fall of year 2011.

Ontotext Lab is responsible for one of the life science use cases of the project, working together with AstraZeneca on applications of scalable high-performance reasoning for semantic data integration in the domain of early clinical development of drugs.

SOA4All is a research project, aiming to bring SOA to the masses through Semantic Web technology. The project officially started on 1st of March, 2008; its duration is three years.

Ontotext Lab is involved in several of the most important areas of the project, including Service Web Architecture and Service Annotation and Reasoning.

The 6th International Semantic Web Conference and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference, 2007 will be held in Busan, Korea between 11-15th Nov.

Ontotext Lab is Platinum Sponsor on the both events.

The GATE team from the Sheffield University and Ontotext lab will have a joint demo at the IRF Symposium in Vienna, 8-9th of Nov.

KIM's CORE Search and Timelines analytical tools will be used to demonstrate semantic retrieval and navigation on top of patent applications.

The analysis of the documents demonstrates state-of-the-art information extraction, performed using GATE and the Semantic Annotation Factory Environment (SAFE).

Atanas Kiryakov is going to present GATE and KIM Platforms in his talk, called: "Semantic annotation trends: co-occurrence analysis and annotation factories" on 7th November, in front of the CMU-RC Research Committee. The talk will cover several subjects related to semantic annotation.

As a start Kiryakov will present GATE (the General Text Engineering Architecture) – one the most widely used information extraction platforms. Next he will discuss the KIM semantic annotation and search platform, which is based on GATE and OWLIM (a scalable high-performance semantic repository). Demonstrations will be given of faceted search, as well as entity popularity and co-appearance trend analysis on top of news articles and patents.

The research committee of Central Michigan University meets 3 times a year and members come to these meetings to learn what is new and exchange ideas.

Ontotext released version 0.9.6 of BigOWLIM – its enterprise-class OWL engine. BigOWLIM remains the only engine which can perform non-trivial OWL reasoning with 1 billion statements. While in 0.9.6 the data loading performance was further improved, the emphasize of this release was on boosting the query performance to levels which allow multiple simultaneous users to perform real-time queries against huge datasets.

The major changes in the new release can be summarized as follows:

Version 0.9.6 of BigOWLIM was the first engine which managed to load and perform inference (total materialization) against the full OWL representation of UNIPROT – the world’s most comprehensive catalog of information about proteins and one of the largest and most popular life science databases.

More details about the UNIPROT runs and query evaluation performance can be found at the end of the standard OWLIM presentation. Slides 9 and 10 there present a map of the most interesting published results on scalable reasoning, including data from AllegroGraph, Openlink Virtouso, and ORACLE 11g.

The detailed change log is available at: http://www.ontotext.com/owlim/change_log.html

The ORDI team is pleased to announce the release of ORDI Framework 0.5-alpha2, which covers the full functionality set of version 0.4.x.

ORDI is a Java middleware framework enabling enterprise data integration via an RDF-like data model. The ORDI data model is neutral in terms of interpretation (or semantics) – it provides freedom of choice of a data-source or a reasoning service to interpret its data accordingly in order to derive the desired results, i.e. to answer questions related to the existing data or to infer new data. The data representation is grounded to an RDF-compatible data model, since it is well-founded and detached from the semantics of the various knowledge representations, ontology, and semantic Web languages used today.

New features:

For more information please refer to: http://ordi.sourceforge.net/

This release includes a number of new features and bugfixes:

WSMO Studio, documentation and Flash demos are available for download at http://www.wsmostudio.org

Since version 2.3.0 TopBraid Composer (TBC) comes bundled with SwiftOWLIM. TBC is an OWL editor that integrates several of the most popular tools, offering RDFS and OWL reasoning, among which Pellet and Jena. SwiftOWLIM have been added to meet the requirements of the TBC customers for scalable reasoning.

“Our initial tests with OWLIM indicate that OWLIM may become a serious alternative to the better-known engines such as Pellet and Jena. My colleague Dean Allemang is using OWLIM to classify ontologies that contain tons of individuals. His models are essentially impossible to handle with Pellet…” wrote Holger Knublauch, TopQuadrant’s VP Product Development, in his blog announcement of the new version of TBC.

TopBraid Composer is an Eclipse-based professional environment for editing RDF Schema and OWL ontologies developed by TopQuadrant, Inc. (Mountain View, CA). TBC is recognized as one of the most advanced OWL editors.

SwiftOWLIM is the free variety of OWLIM – a semantic repository with RDFS and OWL reasoning support developed by Ontotext Lab. According to all published benchmark results, OWLIM is the fastest and most scalable inference machine.

This version comes to deliver a number of fixes and minor improvements in ver. 2.9.0. Most of them are result of feedback of users and consider the utility of OWLIM in specific environments and for configurations. We want to thank all these users as they help us make OWLIM better and easier to use.

The changes in version 2.9.1, regarding 2.9.0:

Based on all publicly available results, SwiftOWLIM is the fastest RDF repository on the planet. SwiftOWLIM and BigOWLIM are still alone in the club of OWL reasoning engines capable in handling millions of statements with performance matching the expectations for a DBMS.

(ANN ARBOR, MI, USA & SOFIA, BULGARIA) – Metamatics, LLC has entered into a collaboration agreement with Ontotext to complete work on three current biomedical information projects in the academic and hospital sectors, including undertakings with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and the University of Michigan.

Under the agreement, Ontotext will supply its KIM semantic annotation platform and OWLIM semantic repository. OWLIM is the only engine capable in reasoning on top of billions of facts; its scalability allows KIM to analyze large volumes of unstructured data and interlink them with huge databases. Metamatics will integrate and operate the software for medical text-mining, namely in order to identify critical terms and relationships within scholarly literature and make them available to manual curators.

“Metamatics applies text mining primarily in contexts where being able to connect extracted terms to controlled vocabularies is critical. Ontotext software provides strong semantic annotation capabilities with impressive performance and scalability. We are excited about the combination of Ontotext’s platforms and Metamatics’ specialized expertise in life sciences software implementation,” said Peter Dresslar, President of Metamatics.

About Metamatics, LLC: Metamatics, LLC is an informatics software company committed to providing life scientists with the tools and technical services they need to foster the next generation of breakthrough research (www.metamaticsllc.com). Metamatics, LLC offices are located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the company maintains productive partnerships with several bioinformatics and cheminformatics laboratories at the University of Michigan.

On 21st, July 2007 in Sofia University will take place the Bulgarian Linux conference organized by Linux-bg.org. The conference includes interesting talks from different areas, demonstrations and gifts for the participants.

Atanas Kiryakov is going to present Sirma and Ontotext technologies in his talk, called: "Next generation databases and search machines, based on Semantic Web technologies". Beginning: 16:00h. More information about the conference could be found here: http://conf.linux-bg.org/.

This release includes many new features:

You may download the latest distributions, documentation (100+ pages) and demos at: http://www.wsmostudio.org

WSMO Studio and wsmo4j are pointed out as two of the reference tools in the "SAWSDL Candidate Recommendation Implementation Report", which was prepared in the course of the submission of SAWSDL for W3C standardization.

Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema (SAWSDL) is a specification that defines mechanisms for adding semantic annotations to WSDL components. The development of the specification is carried out by a W3C working group, which includes representatives of CA, DERI, IBM Corporation, ILOG, S.A., Open University, Telecom Italia SpA, Wright State University.

WSMO Studio and wsmo4j are respectively a modelling environment and an API with reference implementation for Semantic Web Services and Semantic Business Process Modelling, based on the Web Service Modeling Ontology and Business Process Modeling Ontology. Both tools are developed within open-source projects led by Ontotext lab; they are available under LGPL.

SwiftOWLIM ver. 2.9.0 was released. The new multi-threaded inferencer, combined with JDK 1.6, makes OWLIM twice faster in a typical server setup. The emphasize in this version is on reliability and usability. Among the improvements are better transaction isolation and better management of implicit (inferred) statements.

SwiftOWLIM ver. 2.9.0 is much easier to install and play with. The distribution package contains all the necessary runtime libraries. The new Getting-Started application template, allows for bootstrapping new applications, using OWLIM, within few minutes. One can even test OWLIM without compiling Java - just by means of specifying the files to be loaded and the queries.

Major changes in SwiftOWLIM version 2.9.0, 12 June 2007, as compared to version 2.8.4: