Franz’s CEO, Jans Aasman to Present at the 2015 NOSQL NOW! Conference in San Jose

OAKLAND, Calif. — May 22, 2015 — Franz Inc.’s CEO, Dr. Jans Aasman, will present at the 2015 NoQL Now! conference this August in San Jose, CA. The fifth annual NoSQL Now! Conference is the largest vendor-neutral forum focused on NoSQL (Not Only SQL) technologies. The conference is intended for every enterprise looking for better, faster and cheaper solutions to manage its growing databases and data stores.

Spark and SPARQL for the Intelligent Data Lake

‘Data Lake’ refers to the new practice in large enterprises to store all potentially relevant data in a Hadoop infrastructure for later analytics. Data Lakes promise to play a vital role in data analytics and numerous vendors are marketing Data Lakes as an essential part of a comprehensive Big Data strategy. Gartner recently noted that this approach is susceptible to problems with governance, provenance, curation, access control and that it would be very helpful if the data was self describing. So Gartner recommended strategies to add semantic consistency to a Data Lake.

We will present a Semantic Data Lake project, architected on top of Hadoop, that takes as input any data type (i.e. csv files, json, json-ld, XML, unstructured text, etc). The project includes a semantic layer that leverages a distributed parallel semantic indexing engine. This semantically indexed Data Lake can be accessed via map-reduce, Apache SPARK and SPARQL.

The project use case was developed for a hospital chain that already adheres to the Accountable Care Act (ACA) but needed a Data Lake that could provide (predictive) analytics for population research and personalized medicine. The resulting Data Lake contains internal data, data from other hospitals in the same region and publicly available data such as a drug database, clinical trials, etc. All data in the Semantic Data Lake has been curated and transformed to fit ontologies and vocabularies like Mesh, Snomed and UMLS. In addition, all temporal relationships in the hospital data are preserved to provide causal analytics.

About Dr. Aasman

Jans Aasman started his career as an experimental and cognitive psychologist, earning his PhD in cognitive science with a detailed model of car driver behavior using Lisp and Soar. He has spent most of his professional life in telecommunications research, specializing in intelligent user interfaces and applied artificial intelligence projects. From 1995 to 2004, he was also a part-time professor in the Industrial Design department of the Technical University of Delft. Jans is currently the CEO of Franz Inc., the leading supplier of commercial, persistent, and scalable RDF database products that provide the storage layer for powerful reasoning and ontology modeling capabilities for Semantic Web applications.

Accomplishments:

Dr. Aasman has gained notoriety as a conference speaker at such events as Semantic Technologies Conference, International Semantic Web Conference, Java One, Enterprise Data World, Semantics in Healthcare and Life Sciences, Linked Data Planet, INSA, GeoWeb, AAAI, NoSQLNow, Graph Data Management, RuleML, IEEE conferences, and DEBS to name a few.

About Franz Inc.

Franz’s semantic technology solutions help bring Web 3.0 ideas to reality. The company is the leading supplier of commercial, persistent and scalable Graph Database products. AllegroGraph is a high-performance database capable of storing and querying billions of RDF statements. The product provides solutions for customers to combine unstructured and structured data using W3C standard RDF for creating new Web 3.0 applications as well as identifying new opportunities for Business Intelligence in the Enterprise.  AllegroGraph’s Activity Recognition package provides a powerful means to aggregate and analyze data about individual and organizational behaviors, preferences, relationships, plus spatial and temporal linkages between individuals and groups. Franz customers include Fortune 500 companies in the government, life sciences and telecommunications industries. For more information, visit www.franz.com.

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