Franz’s Vice President of Corporate Development to Keynote at The 8th International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management (KSEM 2015)

OAKLAND, Calif. — August 26, 2015 — Franz Inc.’s Vice President of Corporate Development, Dr. Sheng-Chuan Wu, will be a keynote speaker at The 8th International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management (KSEM 2015) this October in Chongqing, China. The aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to provide a forum for researchers in the broad areas of Knowledge Science, Knowledge Engineering, and Knowledge Management to exchange ideas and to report state of the art research results.

Separating the Reality from the Hypes of Big Data

The world is drowning in data. Modern technologies and digital devices have made it very easy to generate, collect and store mammoth data that gives rise to the term, “Big Data”. In 2009, Google published Flu Trends based on analyzing gazillions of flu-related searches to detect the spread of flu even before CDC could, demonstrating how to use Big Data to address societal needs. Since then, everyone wants to collect, analyze, invest in and make money from Big Data. Market research firms predict an exciting business opportunity of US$50 billion by 2017. Industrial experts promise Big Data to solve virtually any problem we encounter.

Is Big Data really what all the market hypes allege to be?

There is no doubt that, by combining the enormous modern and inexpensive computing power and sophisticated Data Mining programs, we are able to process the zettabytes of digital data produced every minute. However, several challenges, namely heterogeneous data sources, convolute data relations and complex queries inherent to predictive analytics besides the sheer size, make it difficult to extract the essential value from big data.

In this talk, Dr. Wu will describe a new analytic architecture, combining the popular big data Hadoop platform, semantic index and distributed query to extract actionable business insight from big data in nearly real-time. He will show the power of this new architecture with real-world examples in Customer Relation Management (CRM) and Healthcare.

About Dr. Wu

Dr. Sheng-Chuan Wu received his Ph.D. in Scientific Computing and Computer Graphics from Cornell University in the US. He has, since graduation, been involved in several software companies, including the founding of the first integrated CAD/CAM/CAE company. He has in the last 20 years worked as a senior corporate executive at the leading Artificial Intelligence and Semantic Technology company, Franz Inc in Silicon Valley, with responsibility in application development, marketing, consulting and new business development. Dr. Wu has also in many occasions collaborated with Bioinformatics experts from Harvard Medical School, Stanford University and Astra Zeneca, working with massive biological data.

Dr. Wu has been focusing on Semantic Technology over the last 7 years. He has routinely lectured on AI and Semantic Technology at conferences. He has, since 2007, conducted more than 20 week-long workshops on Semantic Technology and Artificial Intelligence in Malaysia, China, India and other Asian countries. Additionally, Dr. Wu has consulted on several Big Data and Semantic Technology projects in the US and Asia.

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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Franz’s CEO, Jans Aasman to Present at the Smart Data Conference in San Jose

OAKLAND, Calif. — May 26, 2015 — Franz Inc.’s CEO, Dr. Jans Aasman, will present at the Smart Data Conference this August in San Jose, CA. The Smart Data Conference is designed to accommodate all levels of technical understanding, and brings together emerging disciplines that are focused on more intelligent information gathering and analysis.

Healthcare Analytics with a Smart Data Lake

Montefiore Medical Center in collaboration with Franz, Intel, Cloudera and Cisco created a scalable and extensible Learning Healthcare System platform for accountable care and precision medicine initiatives. The underlying Hadoop based big data platform is called a “Semantic Data Lake” (SDL).

The SDL integrates complex information and analytic requirements including:

Basic science
Clinical
Population
Community
Environmental
Behavioral
Wellness research data

The SDL links and fuses domain specific models (ontologies), biomedical terminologies and taxonomy systems, and other contextual metadata with ERP data, Electronic Medical Records, and medical device data in massive volumes. The SDL provides a uniform, semantically integrated, self-descriptive information repository based on graph representations of multi-source, heterogeneous data (including free text clinical narratives). This platform is expected to grow to 4 trillion edges by the end of 2015.

Montefiore uses this platform for scalable knowledge-based analytics for classification, pattern recognition, predictive modeling, and simulations. We will demonstrate how we can create smart applications for decision support, fraud detection, risk management, personalized care management, signal detection and notifications.

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.

All trademarks and registered trademarks in this document are the properties of their respective owners.

Bloor Research Positions AllegroGraph as a ‘Champion’ in Burgeoning Graph Database Market

Graph Databases Identified as the Fastest Growing Segment of the Database Market

OAKLAND, Calif. — May 5, 2015 — Franz, Inc., the leading supplier of Semantic Graph Database technology, today announced its flagship product, AllegroGraph, has been named a Champion by Bloor Research in its recent Graph Database Market Update report. AllegroGraph is a high performance Semantic Graph Database that enables analytics by leveraging the W3C industry standards. Graph databases are skyrocketing in popularity and have grown by 400% in the past two years, according to a recent DBMS ranking by DB-Engines.

“We are excited that Graph and RDF Databases are beginning to get the attention that they deserve,” said Dr. Jans Aasman, CEO, Franz Inc. “In today’s data-driven environments, the ability to quickly analyze data from diverse sources is becoming critical. We are already seeing how Semantic Graph Databases with predictive analytics can help transform healthcare through Precision Medicineand make us safer through Insider Threat Detection.”

“Graph databases handle a class of issues that are too structured for NoSQL and too diverse for relational technologies,” according to Bloor Research. “Relational databases are inherently limited to one-to-one, many-to-one and one-to-many relationships. They do not cater well for problems (such as bill of materials – a classic case) that are many-to-many. For these types of requirements graph databases not only perform way better than relational databases, but they allow some types of query that are simply not possible otherwise. Semantic query support tends to be particularly strong in triple stores. Another major point is that research suggests that graph visualizations are very easy and intuitive for users.” (Source: Bloor Research, Graph Databases, Philip Howard, April 13, 2015)

About AllegroGraph

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 databases or 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.

About Franz Inc.

Franz Inc. is an innovative technology company with expert knowledge in developing and deploying Graph Search solutions. AllegroGraph, Franz’s flagship, high-performance, transactional, and scalable Graph Database, provides the solid storage layer for powerful Enterprise grade NoSQL solutions. AllegroGraph’s Activity Recognition capabilities 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.

For additional Franz Inc customer success stories please visit:

AllegroGraph – http://franz.com/agraph/success/
Allegro CL – http://franz.com/success/

Franz’s Professional Service team is in the business of helping companies turn Data into Information and Information into Knowledge. We combine Data, Business Intelligence, and Analytics consulting services under one roof for our customers.

Franz, an American owned company based in Oakland, California, is committed to market-driven product development, the highest levels of product quality and responsive customer support and service. Franz customers include Fortune 500 companies in the government, life sciences and telecommunications industries. Franz has demonstrated consistent growth and profitability since inception. For more information, visit franz.com.

All trademarks and registered trademarks in this document are the properties of their respective owners.