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AllegroGraph 6.3 – Now Available

New Features Include:

Defining your own magic properties – AllegroGraph lets you define your own Magic Properties. The Defining Magic Properties Tutorial describes how to do this and provides numerous simple examples. Improvements and new features in AGWebView, including the ability to add data by pasting in a text area, new report dialogs which detail storage usage and other things, a new index management page. See the 6.3.0 programmer notes for details of the changes to AGWebView. Support for XQuery and XPath math functions. CORS support: CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing), if enabled, allows scripts run on a web page from one server to make HTTP requests to the (different) server where AllegroGraph is running.

For additional information, see here

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Gruff v7.2 – Available November 10th

New Features Include:

• The new command “Global Options | Show Non-Default Option Values” lists option values that you have changed from their defaults. That may be useful for finding options that you might like to revert to their default values without reverting all options. (This list will also be included in any bug report that Gruff generates.)
• When using “View | Go Back” and “View | Go Forward” in the graph view, if “Visual Graph Options | Layout Options | Animate Layouts” is enabled then the nodes will slide smoothly from one history state to the next.
• Path-finding will now display paths that contain literals even when “Global Options | Miscellaneous | Treat Literals as Objects” is off (as it is by default).
• If you turn off the new option “Visual Graph Options | Inclusion Options | Include Literals of All Languages”, then commands on the Link menu will add literal nodes to the visual graph only when they have no language or their language tag is the “Global Options | Miscellaneous | Preferred Language”.
• The option “Global Options | Node Label Predicates | Label Property Language” has become the more general “Global Options | Miscellaneous | Preferred Language”. It also has a new “Other” choice at the bottom for specifying any language, rather than being limited to the several choices in the list. (And the more obscure “Global Options | Localization Language” has been moved into the Miscellaneous child menu.)
• The Global Options menu has two new child menus called “Node Label Type” and “Font”. Like the “Timeouts” child menu that was already there, these new menus contain options that appear elsewhere on the menu bar in scattered places, and are simply grouped in a different way on these new menus to make it easier to find all of the options of their kind.
• The keyboard shortcut for doing a tree layout is now T with no shift key, to correspond to the other layout commands that also use no shift key. This means that the keyboard shortcut for going to the table view is now B instead of T.
• The new option “File | Load Triples | Base URI for RDF/XML and Turtle” allows you to specify the base URI that will be passed to AllegroGraph when using the commands for loading triples from RDF/XML files or turtle files.
• Changes to the time chart: (1) Fixed: The time chart could break in certain cases while adjusting the time bar range or resizing Gruff while the time chart is present. (2) The time chart has been improved sylistically, such as by placing each date label in the middle of its time range rather than at the beginning of it. (3) The new command “View | Optional Graph View Panes | Show Time Chart” (with its keyboard shortcut) allows more quickly toggling the time chart on and off than by clicking the button for it on the time bar.
• The new option “Visual Graph Options | Finding Paths Between Nodes | Maximum Paths to Find” causes path-finding to return if it has found that many paths, to avoid wasting time finding additional paths that you would not display anyway. This option will not have an effect until AllegroGraph 6.3.1 is out and Gruff is built on it.

 

For additional information, see the Gruff Documentation

Available November 10th. Contact [email protected] to test an early release.

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Dataconomy article – Triple Attributes: A New Way to Protect the Most Sensitive Information

Semantic Graph Databases are now common in many industries, including life sciences, healthcare, the financial industry and in government and intelligence agencies. Graphs are particularly valuable in these sectors because of the complex nature of the data and need for powerful, yet flexible data analytics.

Attributes, user attributes and static filters are a new mechanism for graph databases to protect sensitive information. This combination provides the right amount of power and flexibility to address high-security use cases, such as: HIPAA access controls, privacy rules for banks, security models for policing, intelligence and the government. In addition, this set of methods is far easier to use, provides more expressiveness than security methods in relational databases and doesn’t suffer from performance degradations.

To read the full article, see here

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Datanami article – Why Enterprise Knowledge Graphs Need Semantics

The Enterprise Knowledge Graph concept strikes at the core of what every data-driven organization is trying to do: translate data assets into a competitive advantage unique to those assets and the company itself.

By effectively connecting enterprise-wide data—both internal and external—into a sole repository reusable for a variety of use cases across an organization, Enterprise Knowledge Graphs are the single most effective mechanism for accomplishing this objective. The proliferation of use cases spanning Silicon Valley’s finest proves this point as well as the business value of this methodology.

To read the full article, see here

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Big Data 50 – Companies Driving Innovation in 2017 – Franz Inc.

Used by Fortune 500 companies that span healthcare, intelligence agencies, life sciences, telecommunications, and research organizations, Franz provides AllegroGraph, a high-performance and transactional semantic graph database, and Allegro CL, a Lisp programming environment to create complex applications for solving real-world problems.

AllegroGraph is a database technology that enables businesses to extract sophisticated decision insights and predictive analytics from
highly complex, distributed data that cannot be uncovered with conventional databases. Unlike traditional relational databases or other NoSQL databases, AllegroGraph employs semantic graph technologies that process data with contextual and conceptual intelligence. AllegroGraph is able run queries of unprecedented complexity to support predictive analytics that help organizations make more informed, real-time decisions.

To read the full article, see here

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The Open Data Science Conference (ODSC West), November 2-4, Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport

ODSC – Open Data Science Conference – is essential for anyone who wants to connect to the data science community and contribute to the open source applications they use everyday. Our goal is to bring together the global data science community to help foster the exchange of innovative ideas and encourage the growth of open source software.

Join us at ODSC West – Nov 2-4. https://odsc.com/california

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The Text Analytics Forum 2017 – Washington DC, November 8-9

Text Analytics is a platform technology that adds depth and intelligence to any organization’s ability to utilize that most under-utilized resource – text. For many years the exponential growth of information has been experienced as a problem – information
overload. However, with a new generation of text analytics tools and techniques, massive amounts of information are becoming part of the
solution for an incredibly wide range of applications, from search that works to social media-fueled insights about customers and
competitors to new flexible approaches to KM, new solutions to fake news, and more. The inaugural theme for Text Analytics Forum, Go
Deeper, invites all who deal with text to take a deep dive into this powerful set of techniques.

For additional information, see here

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Enterprise Data World – Taking Graphs to the Next Level with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning – April 22-27, 2018

The 22nd Annual Enterprise Data World (EDW) Conference hosted by DATAVERSITY® is recognized as the most comprehensive educational conference on data management in the world. Join hundreds of data professionals from around the globe to attend this unique conference. Your transformation to data-driven business starts here!

Franz CEO Jans Aasman will be presenting “Taking Graphs to the Next Level with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning”.

Graphs and Knowledge Management have gained significant visibility with the rebirth of artificial intelligence and emergence of cognitive computing. By combining artificial intelligence, big data, graph databases, and dynamic visualizations, we will discuss deploying Graph based AI applications as a means to help predict future events across numerous types of industries.

Knowledge creation via AI and Graphs stems from the capability to combine the probability space (i.e. statistical inference on a user’s data) with a knowledge base of comprehensive industry terminology systems. AI using Graphs are remarkable not just because of the
possibilities they engender, but also because of their practicality. The confluence of knowledge via machine learning, visual querying, graph databases, and big data not only displays links between objects, but also quantifies the probability of their occurrence. We believe this approach will be transformative across numerous business verticals.

During the presentation we will describe the Graph based AI concepts that also incorporate Hadoop, along with analytics via R, SPARK ML and other AI techniques for practical Enterprise predictive analytics use cases.

For additional information, see here

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Franz Inc. named to the DBTA 100 – The Companies That Matter Most in Data

Franz Inc., an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence and leading supplier of Semantic Graph Database technology, announced it has been named to the Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) 100 – ‘The Companies That Matter Most in Data’. The world of data management is constantly changing. The DBTA 100 recognizes vendors who are evolving with the times and leading the charge to address new opportunities and requirements. Embracing the old and new, well-established and cutting edge, this fifth annual DBTA 100 list spotlights the companies that are dealing with evolving market demands through innovation in software, services, and hardware. The list includes long-established IT companies and newer upstarts anxious to shake up the data management space. Each year, the DBTA 100 presents “View from the Top” articles by company executives explaining how their organizations are uniquely addressing the data challenges of today and tomorrow…

See here to read the full release

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Intel Solution Brief – Montefiore Creates Data Analytics to Advance Patient Care

Like all healthcare organizations, Montefiore faces complex challenges from government pressures to reduce costs and stringent
regulatory guidelines to diverse patient populations and disruptive technologies. A focus and investment in precision medicine has brought the nation’s and industry’s attention to expanding the breadth of patient data in order to personalize treatment for individuals and historically underrepresented groups. Further, understanding patients requires information on a complex array of factors, some of which may
not even be known during a clinical interaction, such as the home and work environment, nutrition, and genetics…

To read about their solution, see here

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Free Webcast – A Time Machine for your Graph

August 23, 10 AM Pacific

Many use cases for a Graph Database, like AllegroGraph, involve temporal events. In general, “Events” are modeled as objects that have a start time, end time, a type, some actors and a geospatial location. In this webinar we will explore the temporal aspects of events using a set of practical examples from healthcare, government intelligence, the world of finance, and real estate.

With Gruff v7.0os new “Time Slider” feature, these examples really come to life. Using Gruff, a semantic graph browser, we will visually demonstrate how graphs that are comprised of temporal events are constructed over time, allowing time machine like exploration of your data.

To watch the recording – Youtube.com/AllegroGraph

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Gruff v7.0 Now Available!

New Features Include:

• Gruff 7.0 features a new time bar, which can be toggled on with the new command “View | Optional Graph View Panes | Show Time Bar”. The time bar is used to compare nodes that have date (or date-time) properties, showing how nodes follow each other and overlap in time. It can also temporarily filter nodes from the display when they do not lie within a specified time range. There are several time bar options on the new “Visual Graph Options | Time Bar” child menu.
• Holding the mouse cursor over a node in the overview pane (the scroller pane at the lower left of the graph view) now displays the label of that node just above the overview pane. That may help find a node that you want to scroll into view. The overview pane will also draw the selected node in red and larger.
• The right-click pop-up menu for the node icons in the legend contains two new commands for highlighting or unhighlighting all of the matching nodes.

For additional information, see here and the Gruff Release History

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Franz Inc. named to the DBTA 100 – The Companies That Matter Most in Data

Franz Inc., an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence and leading supplier of Semantic Graph Database technology, announced it has been named to the Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) 100 – ‘The Companies That Matter Most in Data’. The world of data management is constantly changing. The DBTA 100 recognizes vendors who are evolving with the times and leading the charge to address new opportunities and requirements. Embracing the old and new, well-established and cutting edge, this fifth annual DBTA 100 list spotlights the companies that are dealing with evolving market demands through innovation in software, services, and hardware. The list includes long-established IT companies and newer upstarts anxious to shake up the data management space. Each year, the DBTA 100 presents “View from the Top” articles by company executives explaining how their organizations are uniquely addressing the data challenges of today and tomorrow…

See here to read the full release.

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The Semantics 2017 Conference – Amsterdam, September 11-14

SEMANTiCS 2017 is an international event on Linked Data and the Semantic Web where business users, vendors and academia meet. Widely recognized to be of pivotal importance, it is the thirteenth edition of a well-attended yearly conference that started back in 2005. It offers keynotes by world-class practitioners, presentations and field reports in diverse tracks, talks addressing a variety of topics, and panel discussions. And, of course, ample opportunities for networking and meeting like-minded professionals in an informal setting.

For additional information, see here

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The Text Analytics Forum 2017 – Washington DC, November 8-9

Text Analytics is a platform technology that adds depth and intelligence to any organization’s ability to utilize that most under-utilized resource – text. For many years the exponential growth of information has been experienced as a problem – information overload. However, with a new generation of text analytics tools and techniques, massive amounts of information are becoming part of the solution for an incredibly wide range of applications, from search that works to social media-fueled insights about customers and competitors to new flexible approaches to KM, new solutions to fake news, and more. The inaugural theme for Text Analytics Forum, Go Deeper, invites all who deal with text to take a deep dive into this powerful set of techniques.

For additional information, see here

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Recent Articles about Franz

	Analytics Week – Implementing Personalized, Precision Medicine with Artificial Intelligence and Semantic Graph Technology
	Iot Evolution – IoT will become part of Cognitive Computing
	Data Informed – Data with Relationships Yields Insights Before Analytics
	AI Business – The Consumerization of Artificial Intelligence
	Bloor Research – 2017 Graph and RDF Database Market Analysis
	Database Trends and Apps Report – Building a Data Lake for the Enterprise
	kmworld.com – KM Resurgence in Life Sciences
	virtual-strategy.com – Why Semantics & Data Linking is Vital to Artificial Intelligence

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Free Webcast: The Power of Machine Learning and Graphs – March 1, 2017

Graphs and Machine Learning have long been a focus for Franz Inc. and currently we are collaborating with a number of companies to deliver the ability to understand possible future events based on a company’s internal as well as externally available data. By combining machine learning, semantic technologies, big data, graph databases and dynamic visualizations we will discuss the core components of a Cognitive Computing platform.

We will discuss example Cognitive Computing platforms from Ecommerce, fraud detection and healthcare that combine structured/unstructured data, knowledge, linked open data, predictive analytics, and machine learning to enhance corporate decision making.

Join us 10:00 AM Pacific to learn more. For registration information, see here

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allegRo – The R Project API for AllegroGraph

This is an API for AllegroGraph. It provides an interface to perform actions such as creating repositories, evaluating SPARQL queries, and handling the AllegroGraph server.

R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ¡­) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible.

For additional information and to download, see here

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AllegroGraph Version 6.1.5 Now Available

 

Release 6.1.5 is a maintenance release which fixes bugs, and has new improvements and optimizations.

 

Please see the release notes for a description of the changes.

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Smart Data Conference – Tutorial: Build Your Own Cognitive Computing Platform, January 30

Cognitive Computing Platforms are a growing phenomenon that have been shown to add significant value to the Enterprise. IBM’s Watson is just one of the more well known examples. The power of these platforms is that you not only base your enterprise decisions on what is in your structured enterprise data warehouse, but you also mine the unstructured data. In addition, the platform combines proprietary and
public knowledge in the form of vocabularies, taxonomies, ontologies, and linked open data with a powerful layer of machine learning technologies. The resulting analytics are pushed back into the core knowledge corpus resulting in a learning system that continually tunes desired metrics…

For additional information, see here

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Smart Data Conference – Presentation: Cognitive Probability Graphs for Smart Knowledge Management, January 31

Knowledge creation via Cognitive Probability Graphs stems from the capability to combine the probability space (statistical inference on patient data) with a knowledge base of comprehensive industry terminology systems. Cognitive Probability Graphs are remarkable not just because of the possibilities they engender, but also because of their practicality. The confluence of knowledge via machine learning, semantics, visual querying, graph databases, and big data not only displays links between objects, but also quantifies the probability of their occurrence. We believe this approach will be transformative across numerous business verticals…

For additional information, see here

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Enterprise Data World Presentation: Developing an Advanced Analytics Capability on an Enterprise Data Lake, April 4

Enabling the Data Lake for scalable and extensible analytics with the ultimate goal of developing a learning system is rapidly taking shape for the Enterprise. Until recently big data was focused on processing massive amounts of simple, flat data. But now, there is a requirement to fuse complex data to create more intelligent analytic frameworks to achieve better business decisions. Adding advanced analytics to a Data Lake to create a scalable knowledge-based analytics platform for pattern recognition, classification, predictive modeling, and simulations is rapidly developing with use cases in Fraud Detection, Healthcare, E-commerce, Intelligence, and more…

For additional information, see here.

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TechCrunch article – Putting data back into the hands of owners

In healthcare there is a growing desire for patients to own their medical records. Interestingly, this desire is not coming from patients, it’s based on the view from medical practitioners that patient care and quality of life is directly influenced by the ability of patients to access and utilize their data. This view is core to the Precision Medicine Initiative, a White House program for personalizing
healthcare treatment for individuals and groups that have historically been underrepresented. Its mission statement points out that “Success will require that health data is portable, that it can be easily shared between providers, researchers, and most importantly, patients and research participants”…

See here to read the full article.

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Linkurious plus AllegroGraph

Linkurious is an Enterprise class tool for visualizing graph data. Linkurious is a partner of the International Investigative Journalist Consortium (ICIJ) since the Swiss Leaks scandal. ICIJ network of 370 journalists is using Linkurious to investigate the Panama Papers. Integration with AllegroGraph is currently available for testing. The following images are of Linkurious screenshots displaying graph data stored in AllegroGraph. (Click on image to enlarge).

For additional information, please contact Linkurious

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Gruff version 6.4 Now Available!

New Features Include:

• Fixed: In 6.3.3, dashes were not drawn where node labels are wrapped to multiple text lines and also at their start and end. This included not drawing the minus sign at the beginning of numeric literals.
• There’s a new “View | Web Interaction” child menu where all but the first command are new. Two of them will tell your web browser to search either the web or Wikipedia on the selected node’s label. The other two will attempt to import either descriptions or images from DBpedia or Wikipedia (respectively) based on the selected node’s label, and display them as linked nodes when any are found.
• On the Mac, nodes can now be highlighted and unhighlighted by using the Command key along with a left click (and also dragging to “lasso” a group of nodes to highlight them). The standard gesture had not worked because the Control key is used instead, and a control-left-click on the Mac is interpreted as a logical right-click.
• Various improvements when displaying images (pixmaps) on nodes: The new option “Visual Graph Options | Node Labels | Maximum Initial Node Pixmap Size” limits the initial size of a node that displays an image. When resizing an image node, its width-to-height ratio will be maintained to avoid distorting it. After resizing an image node you can go back to the state just before resizing it, without going back further. The icon in the lower-right corner of an image node is a resizing icon to indicate that you can drag that corner to resize the node. Fixed: Going back to an earlier state did not restore the earlier size of resized nodes.
• Fixed: Path-finding in Gruff 6.3.3 and earlier breaks on AllegroGraph 6.1.0 and later when the user does not have the privilege for evaluating arbitrary code on the server.
• Fixed: Doing a tree layout from a node that’s connected with another copy of itself could draw the tree layout incorrectly and then cause an infinite recursion when moving the mouse over a node.
• When selecting a predicate in the graphical query view, there’s a new option for selecting any of the “magic properties” that Franz provides for enhancing SPARQL queries. (You may not be able to specify the end values that some of them need, though, except by editing the generated query text in the query view.)
• User options are now saved automatically each time you explicity modify an option, to avoid losing changes when Gruff is closed in a way that it doesn’t catch, such as with the close button in the title bar on the Mac (and maybe on GTK generally), or if Gruff or the machine should crash. Options are still saved at exit time as well. They are also saved when you save a view or open or create a database.
• The somewhat obscure new option “Visual Graph Options | Constraint-Based Layout Options | Link to Node Ratio Limit” causes the spring layout algorithm to be used even for small numbers of nodes if the links-to-nodes ratio is high enough that the constraint-based algorithm is likely to take a while.
• When a node is both selected and highlighted, two border colors are used to indicate that it is both, rather than only red to indicate that it’s selected.
• Fixed: In the store-opening dialog, if both the server and port are filled in and you proceed to modify both of them, Gruff would hang for a bit after you change one of them as it asked the mismatching server and port for its catalogs. This request is now always done asynchronously to avoid holding you up, though as a consequence you may now see the dialog appear before it has filled in the lists of catalogs and stores.

For additional information, see the Gruff Documentation

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Recent Articles about Franz

	Oxford Journals – Briefing in Bioinformatics – How the strengths of Lisp-family languages facilitate building complex and flexible bioinformatics applications
	Virtual Strategy Magazine article – Why Semantics & Data Linking is Vital to Artificial Intelligence
	KMWorld article – How does precision medicine become a reality? The Semantic Data Lake for Healthcare makes it possible
	HealthIT Analytics article – Semantic Computing, Predictive Analytics Need Reliable Metadata
	insideBIGDATA article – The Magic of Visual Querying

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Brief Customer and News Highlights

	We are Hiring!
	2015 HiMSS Conference, Intel’s Healthcare Panel, Parsa Mirhaji, MD, PhD, the Director of Clinical Research Informatics at the Montefiore Medical Center discusses their Semantic Data Lake and technical partnerships with Intel and Franz Inc. and Intel – Cisco presenting Franz’s Semantic Data Lake Analytics at HIMSS 2015
	Bloor Research Positions AllegroGraph as a “Champion”. Click on the image to enlarge.
	Franz was named as one of 21 NoSQL Innovators to Look for in 2020, in a post on The Wikibon technology research and advisory website because of its flagship RDF and Graph Database product, AllegroGraph.
	Graph databases, like AllegroGraph, are one of the new technologies encouraging a rapid re-thinking of the analytics landscape. By tracking relationships – in a network of people, organizations, events and data – and applying reasoning (inference) to the data and connections, powerful new answers and insights are enabled… Wolters Kluwer Presentation: “How does Linked Open Data change the Publishing Landscape?”
	Recorded Webcast – Haystax presents: Advanced Analytic Techniques for Insider Threat Detection
	The Malaysian State of Sabah’s Biodiversity Center’s (SaBC) is using AllegroGraph to run the Sabah Biodiversity Integrated Information System (SaBIIS) AllegroGraph is the centralized RDF database used to integrate and store biodiversity data coming from more than 20 organizations that collect specimen data in different formats and schemas.Read the press release here.
	KRSTE.my (Knowledge Resource for Science and Technology Excellence, Malaysia) is an initiative, based on AllegroGraph, by MOSTI and spearheaded by MASTIC to address science and technology issues and challenges faced by the community, the ministry and the country. KRSTE.my is designed to be a Single Point Access Facilities (SPAF) providing intelligent collaborative knowledge management and learning services platform on Science and Technology and Innovation. More info here.
	Information Management article – Why Data Lakes Require Semantics
	Inside Analysis article – Events that Change the World
	Datanami article – Multi-Dimensional Graph Data Opens the Door to New Applications
	Datanami article – Hadoop, Triple Stores, and the Semantic Data Lake

Recorded past Semantic Technologies Webinars: Recorded
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