Franz’s CEO, Jans Aasman to Present at SemTech ‘12 in London

OAKLAND, Calif. — September 11, 2012 — Franz Inc.’s CEO, Dr. Jans Aasman, will present at the September Semantic Technology Conference in London.   The Semantic Technology & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) brings together today’s industry thought leaders and practitioners to explore the challenges and opportunities jointly impacting both corporate business leaders and technologists. Attendees benefit from this unique opportunity to explore how semantic solutions and linked data are being embraced throughout companies across a diverse range of business categories.

A Semantic Platform for Tracking Entities in Real Time

Having engaged several Fortune 500 companies with projects to develop Semantic Technology solutions, we have identified several consistent requirements that have become the foundation for successful deployments of Semantic Technologies.

The overarching pattern that we see in these companies can best be described as real time entity tracking in order to perform real time business analytics. Typical entities are students, telephone customers, credit cards or insurance policies.

We identified and built out four components as the basis of our Semantic Technology Projects. Component one is an ETL system that takes data from various input streams and transforms the data into events, encoded as RDF triples that go into a publish subscribe queue. To facilitate this we created a number of plug-ins for the open source ETL tool Talend to provide an R2RML mapping from data into triples. The second component is a forward chaining/backward chaining rule system that takes events out of the queue and combines them with the already existing knowledge about a particular entity and generates new knowledge. For some applications we see more than 10,000 triples per entity. Rules need to be able to deal with a new event in a fraction of a second. The third component is a machine learning system that is trained to generate predictions based on the features of a particular entity (for example: what is the customer going to call about when calling the call center). These predictions are again coded as individual triples. Finally, the fourth component is a reporting system that allows us to do real time analysis over all existing entities.

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 franz.com.

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