One of Europe’s leading independent IT research, analysis and consultancy firms, Bloor Research, has given high marks for the latest releases of Ontotext’s semantic graph database GraphDB for two major improvement features – ease of use and performance.
Bloor Research examines available IT products and how they are used in order to enable organizations to choose the optimal technology solutions for their needs. The company also researches industries and markets into which IT products are sold, and tracks market trends and new developments expected to shape the IT industry in the future.
In a recent update on what’s new in the graph database tech world, Bloor Research Director Philip Howard observes that Ontotext’s GraphDB 8.0 released in December 2016 and the 8.1 version launched in April 2017 have a number of new features and upgrades that offer users easier experience and deliver better performance.
According to Philip Howard, Ontotext has recognized that RDF is perceived by some as difficult to use and has set out to rectify this by introducing new capabilities into GraphDB. Consequently, the GraphDB Workbench Interface has undergone a complete redesign and is now much more intuitive. Also, in the GraphDB 8.1 release, the new visual interface allows users to navigate their graphs without the need to write SPARQL queries. Just as important, Ontotext has introduced features that make SPARQL views easier to handle and now users can switch between different query results and preserve these for reuse.
Another feature that enhances GraphDB’s ease of use is OntoRefine, introduced in the 8.0 release, Bloor’s Howard notes. OntoRefine allows users to do many ETL (extract, transform and load) tasks over tabular data through an intuitive interface. Based on the open source tool for working with messy data – OpenRefine (formerly called Google Refine), and embedded in GraphDB, OntoRefine makes the process of filtering and editing inconsistent data easy and frictionless.
To address the issue of performance, Philip Howard writes further on, Ontotext has introduced three major new features in the 8.1 version – faster writes, parallel inferencing, and optimized named graph indexes. The most interesting of these performance upgrades are the new named graph indexes, he says. These new ‘context’ indexes will be useful in speeding up the performance of queries where context is relevant.
“Finally, it is worth commenting that Ontotext is increasingly emphasising business solutions rather than just being a database technology company. Its current focus is in publishing (especially online) and healthcare, and it also sees potential in the financial and insurance sectors,” the update concludes.
The discussion of GraphDB latest releases is a follow-up to the Graph and RDF Databases 2016 Bloor Market Report. It focuses on the importance of the fact that not all graph databases are created equal, and that the biggest market trend still points towards graph products in general.
In this report, Bloor assesses the features and performance of more than a dozen graph and RDF databases. Commenting on Ontotext’s strengths, Bloor states:
“The company offers a one-stop shop for both the database and text mining. The latter capability is especially strong because of the way that it works in conjunction with big knowledge graphs.”
If you are already using another RDF triplestore, but still want to experience the power of GraphDB, you can benefit from our free migration service.
For more information, contact Doug Kimball, Chief Marketing Officer at Ontotext