Zepheira

Andy Glover interviews Brian Sletten about REST and how it applies to software developers and the organizations they support. Far from being a rogue way to do Web Services, Brian explores exactly why organizations should care about REST for information-driven, business-friendly ways of building systems. He highlights some common misconceptions about REST, SOAP and discusses technologies like Restlets, JSR-311, NetKernel and Groovy

On 19 June at the Enterprise Information Management Conference in Toronto, Uche Ogbuji presented Practical Semantic Technology for the Enterprise in which he shared techniques and tools for applying semantic technology to bring Web architecture within the firewall. He discussed the fact that people can find things so much easier on the Web than in their companies, and touched on how Zepheira plans to address this through the Linked Enterprise Data initiative.

Bob DuCharme interviewed Uche Ogbuji about the concept and application of Linked Data. Ogbuji's talk will help anchor next week's Linked Data Planet conference.

"Think of how we traditionally deal with data in informatics. We look to fit data into neat partitions, shepherd it along neat lines and fit it into grand unified theory. All good, hard science. The problem is that data isn't so easily quantized. It's a living , temperamental entity that absorbs bits of personality from everyone who touches it. Dealing effectively with data requires art, and at Zepheira we really look to the art of data rather than to the science of code. We think adopting the right conventions for data that accommodate its unpredictable qualities is the key to so many of the problems that have dogged IT, and we believe that the web is the most successful set of conventions in this regard. In general we look to apply web architecture to enterprise problems. This brings us right in line with the Linked Data concept, which is really just a way to distill the essential keys to web architecture in a way any developer could tick off his fingers. At Zepheira we start with such principles as the body of art, and we bring together folks who've have proven themselves as journeymen and masters in this art, and we think this positions us to offer particularly effective solutions to our customers."

"At Zepheira we tend towards techniques popularized in (Linked Open Data), but clearly for most of our clients the data can't be thrown into a cloud of public data, so we've added our own refinements leading to what we've started to call Linking Enterprise Data (LED) to increase the definition of the Linked Data principles as applied to organizational data integration and decision support needs."

-- Uche Ogbuji

Uche will be discussing the Linking Open Data (LOD) Project , an exciting initiative to tie together public structured data sets currently available on the Web. This is one of many examples of people who are working together to create webs of data, not just of documents.

Uche will also be participating in a panel of experts discussing the architecture and development considerations developing a Linked Data environment.

The LinkedData Planet conference is sponsored by JupiterMedia and will bring together many of the leading minds of this space including Tim Berners-Lee. The conference will be held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City on June 17-18, 2008.

For more information, please click through the following banner.

Zepheira has announced the launch of a community Web site for the Open Source Persistent URL (PURL) software.

The new community site at purlz.org is intended to become a focal point for further development of the PURL software. The site provides access to mailing lists, coordinated bug reporting, a forum for feature requests and community discussions, documentation and access to the software. The full press release is here .

Zepheira and Aduna are pleased to announce the integration of the Mulgara Semantic Store with the Sesame RDF Framework . The full press release is available here .

Highlighting a popular speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff conferences, Jared Richardson posted a video interview with Zepheira partner Brian Sletten . Brian discussed the most important topics for developers looking to boost their careers, and emphasized one area where they can make a real difference for their employers.

"We spend too much time struggling to get access to our own data. There are schisms between business and the the rules they want to enforce (such as access control) and the information technologies in place to make this available to them. We've thrown a lot of money down the drain trying to do integration at the relational DB level, the Enterprise Application Integration level, even at the Services Oriented Architecture level. While there's a lot of great ideas in that space, it's really the wrong level for integration.

"Our position is that the Web is the biggest, most successful, scalable example of software architecture that gives you access to data in terms of issuing requests for logical names and getting back physical representations. It also gives you the flexibility to change the back ends, to change the intermediaries, and allow people to add value on the edge. They can consume information over here, do some processing on it and republish it....

"When we look at trying to expose information in the enterprise—I don't care what company you work for, your data integration needs are not bigger and more diverse, and needing to be more scalable than the entire world's, so these technologies have been tremendously successful and you should look for ways to adopt them in your organization."

—Brian Sletten

Zepheira is pleased to announce the availability of several new high value courses available in pre-packaged, a la carte and open enrollment settings. Customers can target specific topics or go for longer, more comprehensive Bootcamps to bring their employees and teams quickly up to speed on these must-know next-generation technologies.

The 2-3 Day Courses include:

• Introduction to Semantic Web Technologies
• Applied Semantic Web Technologies
• Service-Oriented Architectures
• Introduction to NetKernel
• XML and Data Transformation

The 5 Day BootCamp provide more comprehensive coverage on the following topics:

• Semantic Technology Bootcamp
• Resource-Oriented Architecture Bootcamp
• Data Architecture

For more information, please see here or contact us for custom requests.

Following on the success of their Jolt-Award winning "Beautiful Code" book, O'Reilly Media is publishing a new book of personal essays by notable architects talking about decisions they have made, architectures they have seen, etc. that resulted in "beautiful" systems.

Brian Sletten will be contributing a chapter on the beauty of Resource-Oriented Architectures as a means of enabling information-driven, business-focused systems that scale. The power of the Web applied to the Enterprise not only solves many of the problems not yet solved by a sad string of failed Silver Bullets, but does so with a business-friendly attention to value-driven migration, efficient use of hardware investments, access control, regulatory compliance, etc.

This week Semantic Universe launched a new site for the Semantic Technology Conference 2008 . The conference organizers, intent on demonstrating the practical value of the technology featured at this conference, hired Zepheira to develop a site with innovative features to benefit attendees, speakers and other participants.

The site features a personalized conference Scheduler , a dynamic user interface based on the the MIT Picker tool which allows the user to quickly look at the available sessions on the schedule, narrowing down choices by facets such as speakers, dates and subject matter, and using common features such as search, pagination, and bookmarking favorites. The user can then select sessions to create a custom schedule, which can be exported to iCal format for incorporation into most popular calendar software. The user can also export other views of the data such as RDF/XML and JSON.

The user can also click through to see session details, and the site provides Weblog features for conference sessions , including the ability for people to comment on sessions, and track the discussion through Atom feeds. Contributing comments requires log-in through OpenID , showcasing the popular, decentralized standard for single sign-on.

The session Weblog features and the overall site framework are implemented using the open source Bright Content platform, one of the many community projects supported by Zepheira.

Zepheira president Eric Miller makes a presentation, "Weaving a Web of Data" at the TTI/Vanguard Boston conference on 25 September 2007. The presentation discusses the role of of Web technology in enterprise systems, addressing an audience of executives. The theme of the conference is "The Wealth of Networks", and sessions will look beyond "Web 2.0" technologies to a new generation of pervasive networks anticipated to cause further disruption and opportunities. "A wealth of networks allows for smoother collaboration as data and applications quickly make their way to the Web. With networks everywhere, where data resides no longer matters, as long as it’s easily accessible. Software running on laptops may soon fade away, as Web-resident apps get rented, shared, shifted, rebuilt, and mashed up."

Zepheira president Eric Miller has been invited to give a keynote talk at the 2007 Rich Web Experience (RWE), a conference in San Jose 6-8 September. In his talk, "The One Web", he will discuss convergence of the different factions trying to push the Web forward, informed by his long history in core development of the Web. The session will include a demonstration of how richer Went user interface mets with richer Web data integration for more effective collaboration and information management. Brian Sletten, Partner at Zepheira, will present "Data Integration Part I: Beyond Cutesy Mashups". Brian, a long-time presenter at RWE sister seminar series No Fluff Just Stuff will be discussing how to bring together information from numerous silos using the same technologies that make the Web work as a fairly unified whole.

Brian Sletten has been invited to start contributing articles to DevX's new Semantic Web Zone. DevX, a site popular with developers solving real-world problems, has started this new area on the Semantic Web to meet a growing demand for instructional material on semantic-oriented technologies. The site will feature a variety of articles dealing with particular technologies as well as larger introductions to the underlying concepts and strategies. Brian's first article is an introduction to the URI spec and some of the complexities found in long-lived naming schemes.

Zepheira and OCLC Online Computer Library Center announced today that they will work together to rearchitect OCLC's Persistent URL (PURL) service to more effectively support the management of a "Web of data." The software developed will be released under an Apache 2 Open Source Software license allowing PURLs and the PURL infrastructure to be used in various applications for public or proprietary use. PURLs provide a level of indirection that allows the underlying Web addresses of resources to change over time without negatively affecting systems that depend on them. This capability provides continuity of references to network resources that may migrate from machine to machine for business, social or technical reasons. The new PURL software will also be updated to reflect the current understanding of Web architecture as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This new software will provide the ability to permanently identify networked information resources, such as Web documents, as well as non-networked resources such as people, organizations, concepts and scientific data. This capability will represent an important step forward in the adoption of a machine-processable "Web of data" enabled by the Semantic Web.

OCLC identified Zepheira for their expertise with Semantic technology and retained their services for the design and implementation effort required to bring the PURL service to its full potential. Zepheira's work on identification technology on the scale of the Web dovetails with their solutions to help organizations manage and integrate data scattered within their walls. PURL software is also an important component in many of Zepheira's enterprise solutions.

"We are very excited to be taking on this work because one of the most important principles for Zepheira is that developments towards a Semantic Web can be carefully tuned and scaled to meet the immediate needs of businesses, while valuable experience from solving enterprise needs can bring focus to Semantic Web efforts. This project for OCLC is a clear embodiment of this interchange, and helps establish Zepheira's place at the vanguard of data integration as well as enabling the Semantic Web." -- Eric Miller, President, Zepheira

Kathy MacDougall, Zepheira Principal and founding Product Manager for the swoRDFish Metadata Initiative, has co-authored The swoRDFish Metadata Initiative: Better, Faster, Smarter Web Content with current swoRDFish Product Manager, Susie Cone of Sun Microsystems, Inc.. This case study outlines the way in which Sun Microsystems uses Semantic Web technologies to integrate various types of product-related information held in many systems across the company and drive dynamic delivery of this content to its external web properties. The paper was prepared for W3C's Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group, which recently launched a site—Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group: Case Studies and Use Cases—to showcase how Semantic Web technologies are providing value in a variety of organizations.

Investor's Business Daily interviewed Eric Miller for their Special Report on Web 2.0. The interview covered Semantic Web technologies and how these can be used to facilitate effective collaboration and data reuse within the enterprise.

"These technologies make it easier to free the data from the application that created it and combine this with other data sources, identify new relationships among disparate sets of data and use this information to draw new conclusions for more effective business decisions."—Eric Miller, After All This Interactivity, Look Out For Web 3.0 Leap, by J. Bonasia, Investor's Business Daily

David Wood, a partner in Zepheira, has been invited to join the program committe for the workshop FIRST (First Industrial Results of Semantic Technologies), to be held in conjunction with the 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2007. This workshop aims to have presentations from industry reporting on early adoption of semantic technologies. The audience will be researchers who will learn what industry needs from their research. It is being organized by Lyndon Nixon of Free University Berlin, Roberta Cuel of University of Trento and Claudio Bergamini of Imola Informatica, Italy.

Uche Ogbuji a Partner in Zepheira, has been invited to XML Prague 2007 to make presentations of XML's connection to the Python Programming language, and to Microformats. The discussion of XML and Microformats includes consideration of basic Semantic technology. This focused conference in the Czech capital is organized by Institute for Theoretical Computer Science and Ginger Alliance.

"A regular conference on XML for developers, markup geeks, information managers, and students, focusing this year on Alternative Approaches to XML Processing. A full day of experts speaking has been extended with an additional day dedicated for participants to hold related BoF sessions and workshops."—XML Prague home page

EWeek has published an story by Jim Rapoza discussing the Semantic Web. In "Spinning the Semantic Web", Jim interviews Eric Miller of Zepheira and Tim Berners-Lee of the W3C on the increased recognition of need for technologies to assist in semantic integration of data in the Enterprise and on the Web. Even when high profile companies choose not to use specific Semantic Web technologies, it is possible to convert their proprietary data into standard and reusable forms for additional linkage in a web of data. EWeek concludes:

"Our take is that the Semantic Web will eventually succeed, as it holds too many benefits for too many people to fall by the wayside. But it's also likely that the Semantic Web won't come about in the exact same way that many people envision. The lesson of the Web 2.0 technologies is that users are often surprising in the way they utilize new technologies. Miller told us that he had already seen businesses using Semantic Web technologies in interesting and unexpected ways." "Spinning the Semantic Web", 29 May 2007.

EContent magazine editor Michelle Manafy interviewed Eric Miller of Zepheira on 24 April 2007 about practical applications of the Semantic Web. They discussed common misconceptions of Semantic Web, and the present surge in practice of such technology after long incubation.

"Businesses are starting to realize the full potential of employees' collective mind-share as they create digital assets, spreadsheets, presentations, e-mail and such... Enterprises that treat their environment as a Web of data are able to take advantage of how information is connected to mine their employees' insights in order to make better business decisions."—Eric Miller, "Practical Applications of the Semantic Web" podcast, 24 April 2007.

As part of the Talking with Talis podcast series Paul Miller interviewed Eric Miller (no relation) of Zepheira. Eric spoke about his background, Semantic Web in general, and how Zepheira helps clients put this technology into practice.

"Zepheira provides a variety of solutions for data management and integration based on open, royalty-free Semantic Web standards, with individual skill-sets ranging from XML to RDF, from technology to business. We provide education, mentoring, architecture and implementation to take best-of-breed open source as well as commercial solutions and help organizations, communities and companies become more effective in terms of managing the data they have, seeing and understanding new connections in the data, and making more effective decisions."—Eric Miller, Talking with Talis, 13 April 2007.

Zepheira partner David Wood discusses the past, present and future of the Mulgara Semantic Store with Talis.

David Wood, a partner in Zepheira, was recently interviewed for a full length news feature to appear in the July-August edition of IEEE Software. The feaure will explore how and if the concepts and technologies in the Semantic Web are affecting, or will affect, the discipline of software engineering. David attracted the interest of the editors after his paper Toward a Software Maintenance Methodology using Semantic Web Techniques was presented at Software Evolvability 06.

David Wood, a partner in Zepheira, has been invited to join the program committe for the workshop Bridging the Gap between Semantic Web and Web 2.0, to be held in conjunction with the 4th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) 2007. The main topic of the workshop is to bridge the gap between the Semantic Web and the upcoming Web 2.0 communities. The workshop is being organized by Andreas Hotho and Bettina Hoser of Universitaet Kassel.

David Wood, a partner in Zepheira, has been invited to join the program committe for the workshop Making Semantics Work For Business, to be held in conjunction with the 4th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) 2007. This workshop aims to solicit demonstrations of semantic technologies solving real business problems and is being organized by Lyndon Nixon of Free University Berlin, Roberta Cuel of University of Trento and David de Francisco of Telefonica, Spain.

Brian Sletten and David Wood, partners in Zepheira, have recently signed a contract with The Pragmatic Programmers to co-author a book on Representational State Transfer (REST). REST is the architectural style used by much of the World Wide Web and one of two major approaches to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). The book is to be published in early 2008.

As part of BusinessWeek's "CEO Guide To Technology" series Rachael King interviewed Eric Miller of Zepheira for "The CEO Guide to the Semantic Web". The interview, recorded 9 April 2007, discussed the evolution of Semantic Web technology, and focused on the factors that make this technology particularly relevant to businesses today.

"Quite frequently businesses are realizing that inside their organization they're creating very valuable data assets, and the problem of not being able to stitch those data assets together is keeping them from making effective decisions."—Eric Miller, "The CEO Guide to the Semantic Web", 9 April 2007.

"Part I: A Smarter Web" is a feature article by John Borland in the March, 2007 edition of MIT Technology Review. The four-page article includes significant coverage of Zepheira, touches on the company's professional work and the personal journey of President Eric Miller. The author traces Semantic Web technology from labs and institutions through early adoption in smart organizations through venture capitalists and into the business mainstream. Zepheira's expert team has taken a lead role in shepherding Semantic technology through all these stages of development, and commercialization. We are at the forefront of efforts to integrate the promise of semantic technology into the practical needs of today's organizations. Contact us today to learn more.

"Zepheira, a consulting company that helps businesses link fragmented data sources into easily searched wholes..."—John Borland in MIT Technology Review, 19 March 2007

Daniel Krech, along with a great group of contributors, has released rdflib-2.4.0, a Python library for working with RDF. The library contains parsers and serializers for RDF/XML, N3, NTriples, Turtle, TriX and RDFa. The library presents a Graph interface which can be backed by any one of a number of store implementations, including, memory, MySQL, Redland, SQLite, Sleepycat, ZODB and SQLObject. The 2.4.0 release contains improved literal support in regards to datatype mapping and comparison operations, many SPARQL fixes and improvements, and many other fixes and improvements.

Brian Sletten has introduced a new data mashups talk to be presented as part of the 2007 No Fluff Just Stuff Tour. The talk focuses on emerging technologies that will enable a level of data integration rarely seen in the enterprise. Examples include consuming del.icio.us queries as iTunes podcasts, viewing data multi-dimensionally in Exhibit and exercising Yahoo Pipes-like functionality in Pinky, a rapidly growing NetKernel module for RSS feed remixing.

The Web Accessibility Initiative WAI Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (ERT WG) has released the first public Working Draft of HTTP Vocabulary in RDF. This specification defines an RDF vocabulary for concepts relating to HTTP protocol and conventions. This can be used in a variety of ways, including expression of business rules for Web interaction and analysis of actual Web interaction records.

The Semantic Technology Conference has for the past three years been a highly successful gathering of the best and brightest on the subject. Eric Miller of Zepheira presented the keynote at the inaugural conference in 2005 and Uche Ogbuji has spoken at the 2005 and 2006 conferences. The call for presentations for the 2007 conference is closing Monday, December 18, 2006. Registration is opening soon. If you’re interested in latest developments in semantic technology and its practical application, do plan to attend the conference.

Eric Miller will be giving the Keynote at MESDA’s 14th Annual Conference on how Semantic Web and Web 2.0 improve businesses today. MESDA is Northern New England’s premier networking and educational event. If you’re interested in understanding how these technologies will shape the future of how individuals, groups and businesses can be more effective in data management, merging and reuse, plan to attend.