TopBraid Composer 2.0 moves the ultimate promise of Semantic Web solutions closer to reality

By: Web 2.0 News Desk
Mar. 7, 2007 07:15 AM

TopQuadrant - the company for which AJAXWorld 2007 East speaker Dean Allemang (pictured) works as a Semantic Web consultant - has announced the succesful development of what it claims is "the only commercially-ready ontology design environment that meets the needs of application developers who are building scalable applications for consumers and enterprises" - enabling software applications to organize and process information, thus making the web 'smarter' for people and machines.

TopBraid Composer 2.0, says the company, allows users to select from a catalog of available inference (reasoner) engines and execute the reasoners in a specified order.  Users can run SPARQL queries or rules on top of a description logic reasoner.

Allemang is a long-time traveller in knowledge science. He was awarded his PhD in AI in 1990, worked at five different AI labs in Europe between 1990-1996, and co-founded a company in the mid-90s that tried to invent the Semantic Web when the standards were just a gleam in the eye of a few W3C folks.

As a consultant for TopQuadrant he is the one running the training course, but he learns more from the students than they ever guess, he saus.

His laptop is full of Semantic Web software, and he even knows how to use more than half of it. "It's an exciting time," says Allerman, "for those of us who have been fans of abstraction for the past three decades."

Allemang's session at AJAXWorld 2007 East is called "Using RDFa to Build Semantic Mash-ups." Semantic Mash-ups ("SMash-ups" for short) are combinations of information from multiple sources using the W3C Semantic Web languages (RDF and OWL) to control merging and filtering of the mashed-up data.

Allemang will present a system for building Smash-ups from many different kinds of Web sources, including RDF source, databases, and Web pages (via RDFa, the RDF in HTML proposal).