Franz Extends GRUFF, its RDF Browser for Data Discovery and Visual Query Building

Gruff v4 and AllegroGraph Power Discovery for CRM, SEO, Security, Social Networking, Banking, and Telco Applications 

OAKLAND, Calif. — August 20, 2012 – Franz Inc., the leading supplier of Graph Database technology for the Semantic Web, today announced Gruff v4, the industry’s leading RDF browser to view graph data, explore connections within data, and visually build queries without writing code. In addition, Gruff allows users to easily visualize the RDFa embedded metadata on websites and combine with open or proprietary data to infer new facts.

The free-form nature of Graph style data offers a lot of flexibility for constructing databases, but that freedom can also make it less obvious how to find arbitrary data for retrieval, error checking, or general browsing. Gruff is a graphical Resource Description Framework (RDF) database browser which makes data retrieval more pleasant and powerful by providing a variety of tools for laying out cyclical graphs, displaying tables of properties, managing queries, and building SPARQL and Prolog queries as visual diagrams.

“Gruff allows for easy viewing of graph style data and provides an easy on-ramp for non-technical users to engage the Semantic Web.” said Dr. Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz, Inc. “Users can easily create queries visually without knowing the query language of the Semantic Web – SPARQL, which further empowers the business user for this technology.”

Key Features in Gruff v4:

• Creating and Editing RDF triples/quads – Data editing in the graph view. Triples can now be created, reversed, and deleted in the graph view, this functionality is also available in the table view.
• Visual Query Builder – allows creating queries as diagrams of nodes and links. A query diagram can include actual objects from the store, which you select as in other views, while other nodes and links represent query variables. Group graph patterns such as UNION and OPTIONAL groups can be laid out as grouper boxes that can be nested to any level, with proper nesting maintained automatically.
• Outline View – for browsing and editing linked nodes as an indented outline. It is especially useful for viewing hierarchies of nodes such as those using rdfs:subClassOf or skos:narrower predicates, and editing them by shifting nodes around (perhaps while adding new nodes as well).
• Reification support in the graph view. The graph view now displays reification intuitively by drawing a link line from a reifying subject node directly to the middle of the link line for the triple that it reifies. Also, if a link line’s triple is reified, then a command on its pop-up menu allows you to display a reifying triple.
• RDFa Viewer – Companies like Overstock, BestBuy, Tesco and many others are using RDFa in their web pages to optimize search. Other companies are choosing to make their “metadata” about their product catalogs available via RDFa. This development is primarily driven by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) considerations; however, there is a great opportunity to use this recently available metadata for new types of services. Gruff has the ability extract the RDFa from a website with a simple cut and paste of the URL. The data is then easily viewed in Gruff’s graph, table, or outline views.

Gruff v4 is available as a free download from the Franz website. The product runs on Mac OSX, Windows, Linux and is offered as a standalone application or client-server for remote users.

Dr. Aasman will discuss the capabilities of AllegroGraph and Gruff on August 22 at the NoSQL Now! 2012 conference in San Jose, CA.

Franz VP of Corporate Development will also be discussing these new capabilities at the September Artificial Intelligence Special Sessions on Semantic Technology Applications (AISS 2012) in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. AISS 2012 is organized by MIMOS BERHAD and co-located with other events during the Knowledge Technology Week 2012 (KTW2012).

AllegroGraph is the only NoSQL database to achieve the loading of over 1 Trillion RDF Triples, a major step forward in scalability for the Semantic Web. AllegroGraph is a modern high-performance database that continues to raise the bar in Web 3.0 database scalability. Disk-based storage allows the database to scale to billions of triples while maintaining superior performance. AllegroGraph 4.9 is an enterprise-class database with ACID transactions, full recovery, 100% read concurrency, online backups, dynamic and automatic indexing, advanced free text indexing, deletion of duplicate triples, and now, warm standby, replication, and point in time recovery.

About Franz Inc.

Franz Inc. is a leading vendor of Semantic Technology, Common Lisp tools and Professional Services. Franz Inc. recently introduced Allegro SET, the industry’s first Semantic Entity Tracker, a leading-edge development platform to build flexible and scalable semantic applications quickly and cost-effectively.

Franz’s graph database, AllegroGraph®, has been an industry leader for several years and provides a scalable storage layer for powerful Complex Event Processing applications that incorporate GeoTemporal Reasoning, Social Network Analytics and Ontology Modeling capabilities and operates as the core of Allegro SET.

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 Inc., 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.

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