Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Gruff v5.5 - Now Available

Build an Ad Hoc Federation from AllegroGraph and SPARQL Endpoints

Gruff allows you to build a temporary federation on the fly as you browse a series of AllegroGraph stores and/or SPARQL endpoints. At any time, the set of triples that you are currently browsing will consist of everything that's in the single AG store that you have open or the single endpoint to which you are connected, plus any triples that Gruff downloaded while you were browsing earlier stores and/or endpoints. You can continue to browse the triples that were downloaded earlier along with triples that you're fetching from the current store or endpoint.

You can set this up when using either File | Open Triple-Store or File | Connect to SPARQL Endpoint. To do so, check the check box that's labeled "Retain the triples that were downloaded from the previous store or endpoint".

The check box for retaining triples will initially be selected if you selected it when opening the previous store or connecting to the previous endpoint. This allows quickly reopening recent stores or endpoints to continue building an ad hoc federation, without reselecting the option every time. For example, you can reselect recently-used stores and endpoints from the File menu whenever you want to resume fetching triples from particular sources. That process is also faster when Global Options | Miscellaneous | Confirm Closing Stores is disabled, by avoiding the dialog that it shows.

When retaining triples, the information from the previous store or endpoint that's displayed in Gruff's various views is not cleared. In the table view, for example, you can then still use View | Go Back to review nodes from the previous store. In particular, in the graph view you can continue building a single visual graph from multiple sources, where a node that exists in two or more of those sources can display links to nodes from different sources.

Similar borrowing of triples from an endpoint can be done by using SERVICE clauses in SPARQL queries in the query view. Though SELECT queries do not return actual triples, Gruff will use the query results to deduce some triples that must exist at the SPARQL endpoints that were accessed, and include those in the ad hoc federation that it is browsing.
Usually Gruff will fetch triples only from the store or endpoint that you are currently browsing, and display only "leftover" triples from earlier sources. One exception to that is when using SERVICE clauses in SPARQL queries. The other exception is that if you click on an object in the righthand column in the table view to display that object's triples, and that table row's triple had been fetched from a SPARQL endpoint, and that endpoint is not the store or endpoint that you are currently browsing, then Gruff will fetch triples from BOTH that triple's endpoint AND from the store or endpoint that you're currently browsing (unless it has already fetched them from those sources, as usual). This is one way to continue browsing an earlier endpoint after switching to browsing another store or endpoint.

In the table view, any row that represents a triple that was fetched from a different store or endpoint than the one that you're currently browsing will show the name of that store or endpoint on the right. It will be shown in square brackets to differentiate it from the name of the triple's graph, which is shown in the same location whenever it's not the default graph.

If triples are fetched from multiple sources where the triples are in the default graphs of those sources and they have the same subject, predicate, and object, then by default Gruff will treat them as distinct triples. In the table view, for example, there will be a separate row for each one, with the source shown on the right except for the one that's from the current store or endpoint. This shows which sources contain each triple. Alternately, Gruff will merge these equivalent triples into a single one if you enable Global Options | Miscellaneous | Merge Retained Triples.

This procedure never creates triples in any stores. It only builds a temporary collection of triples in memory for browsing. If you would like to add triples to an AllegroGraph store from other stores and/or endpoints, a way to do that in Gruff would be to browse the source store or endpoint and use File | Export Displayed Data As | N-Triples or one of the other commands on that same child menu. Then open the destination store and use File | Load Triples | Load N-Triples (or one of its sibling commands) to load the file of saved triples into the AG store.

When browsing multiple AllegroGraph stores, an alternative is to use File | Federate Recent Stores, or to select multiple stores in the same catalog when using File | Open Triple-Store. That will federate ALL of the triples from the multiple stores together, and then you can browse all of them as a single AG store, including doing user queries over the whole federation.


DOWNLOAD

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

AllegroGraph v4.14 - Download

AllegroGraph v4.14 can be downloaded from the following link:

#AllegroGraph Download
http://franz.com/downloads.lhtml

#AllegroGraph Documentation
http://franz.com/agraph/support/documentation/current/agraph-introduction.html

#AllegroGraph Clients
http://franz.com/agraph/allegrograph/clients.lhtml


Wednesday, July 9, 2014

AllegroGraph News - July 2014



AllegroGraph News
July, 2014

In this issue

Free Webcast: Graph vs. Semantic Graph Databases - Selecting the Right Database for Your Next Project
Franz Graph Logo

Wednesday, July 23rd, 10 AM Pacific

A frequent question for Semantic Technology vendors: "Why use an RDF triplestore, why not a general Graph database or some other NoSQL option?" This presentation discusses the criteria for selecting the appropriate database for your application.
With the surge in interest around "Graph" technologies there is a need for understanding the tradeoffs for various Graph based technologies. There is a whole set of use cases where Graph technologies make the most sense for application success. This presentation will explore the technical and business reasons to consider a Graph Database, RDF Database, or hybrid Graph/NoSQL. We will discuss a set of real world applications for Graph technologies and explore a number of criteria to consider for proper database selection, a few are noted below:
Selection criteria:
  • (1) Do you need to model knowledge or assets and you literally have to deal with thousands of objects that have different feature sets?
  • (2) Do you add or change object definitions on a nearly daily basis?
  • (3) Do you need to do do recursive graph search on your data or you need to do complex pattern matching?
  • (4) Do you have to deal with innumerable one to many or many to many relations and you need to index them all?
To register for this webinar, see https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/147446290target blank image.

Free Webcast: Discovering the Social Networks in your Customer Data
Gruff View

Wednesday, August 13, 10 AM Pacific

Most Enterprises have collected large bodies of data that describe interactions between their customers. Consider the graph of claims and policies for an insurance provider, telephone calls and SMS for a Telco, and links between payments by customers of financial institutions. Graph databases can be used to mine these social interactions to better understand customer patterns and opportunities.
Relational databases are fundamentally unfit to explore the graph within a social network and Big Data solutions (Hadoop, etc) are usually not meant to work with sparse graphs. The mature capabilities of Graph Databases have made them the optimal approach to mine these social networks.
During this presentation, we will discuss applications of graph mining to show the relationships discovered through "Similarity" and "Social" graphs.
To register for this webinar, see https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/252265562target blank image.

Previous Webcasts: YouTube - The AllegroGraph Channel

AllegroGraph 4.14 Available July 14th 

New features include:
  • Redesigned Query Interface for AGWebView. The interface has enhanced functionality and includes a CANCEL button to easily allow user to cancel uncompleted queries. See notes in the WebView Documentation
  • AGWebView's SPARQL query user interface now supports query log viewing, query plan inspection and reports additional details about query execution such as query time and warnings
  • Enhanced auditing and end user security capabilities
See the full list of new features and improvements in the release notes.

Gruff v5.3 - Now Available
gruff lab guy
New Features include:

See the full list of new features and improvements in the release notes.

2014 NoSQL Now! August 19-21 to feature Dr. Jans Aasman
NoSQL 2014
The fourth annual NoSQL Now! Conference is the largest vendor-neutral forum focused on NoSQL (Not Only SQL) technologies.
Join us for Franz's Presentation - Enhancing Hadoop for GeoTemporal Graph Analyticstarget blank image. Wednesday, August 20, 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
For additional conference information, see heretarget blank image..

Franz Sponsors GraphLab Conference 2014 - San Francisco, July 21
GraphLab Logo
The conference is a non-profit event held by GraphLab.org to promote applications of large scale graph analytics in industry. We invite talks from all major state-of-the-art systems for graph processing, graph databases and large scale data analytics and machine learning. A mega event is planned for this year, with around 800-900 data scientists attending, with the topic of graph analytics and large scale machine learning.

For additional conference information, see heretarget blank image.

Follow us on Google Plus, Twitter, and YouTube 

Google+
Twitter


Brief Highlights
White Papers

White Papers
Franz was named as one of 21 NoSQL Innovators to Look for in 2020, in a post on The Wikibon technology research and advisory websitetarget blank image. because of its flagship RDF and Graph Database product, AllegroGraph.



Gartner Logo
Gartner Names Semantic Technologies To Its Top Technology Trends Impacting Information Infrastructure in 2013. Semantic technologies have made it to Gartner's list of the top technology trends that will impact information infrastructure this year. Read the full article heretarget blank image..

Pfizer Logo
Graph databases, like AllegroGraph, are one of the new technologies encouraging a rapid re-thinking of the analytics landscape. By tracking relationships - in a network of people, organizations, events and data - and applying reasoning (inference) to the data and connections, powerful new answers and insights are enabled...

Haystax picked as 2013's best small business dealmaker. Tools from Haystax Technology, a new analytics company, helped law enforcement officers scrutinize potential threats in real time from 600 data sources.
Read the full article heretarget blank image..
The Malaysian State of Sabah's Biodiversity Center's (SaBC) target blank image. is using AllegroGraph to run the Sabah Biodiversity Integrated Information System (SaBIIS)target blank image. AllegroGraph is the centralized RDF database used to integrate and store biodiversity data coming from more than 20 organizations that collect specimen data in different formats and schemas.
Read the press release here.

krsteKRSTE.my (Knowledge Resource for Science and Technology Excellence, Malaysia) is an initiative, based on AllegroGraph, by MOSTI and spearheaded by MASTIC to address science and technology issues and challenges faced by the community, the ministry and the country. KRSTE.my is designed to be a Single Point Access Facilities (SPAF) providing intelligent collaborative knowledge management and learning services platform on Science and Technology and Innovation. More info heretarget blank image..
Central Things Manager is a Drupal module being developed that uses AllegroGraph to centrally maintain data structures and content allowing Content Types, Taxonomies, and Content to be shared among many Drupal sites.
Read the full post, including a video demonstration heretarget blank image..


Recorded past Semantic Technologies Webinars: Recorded Webinars

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

The SSL Heartbleed bug: UPDATE NOW!

The OpenSSL "Heartbleed Bug (CVE-2014-0160)" (see https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv_20140407.txt), as it is being called, is a serious security hole in the Secure Sockel Layer (SSL) used for sending private documents over the internet. This bug is fixed for AllegroGraph and Allegro CL by our recent SSL module update. 

AllegroGraph Servers

Here are the specific steps to fix AllegroGraph servers:
  1. Download the following to your local machine running AllegroGraph:
       http://franz.com/ftp/pub/patches/8.2/linuxamd64.64/aclissl.so
    
  2. Find where AllegroGraph is installed and replace the file of the same name in that installation directory with the one downloaded in step #1.
  3. Restart the AllegroGraph server. That is, stop it with (AG directory is the directory where AllegroGraph is installed):
    [AC directory]/bin/agraph-control --config [AG directory]/lib/agraph.cfg stop 
    
    and restart it with
    [AG directory]/bin/agraph-control --config [AG directory]/lib/agraph.cfg start
    
Most AllegroGraph clients (AGWebview, etc.) run with non-Allegro CL software, which should be updated independently and the client restarted when the AllegroGraph server is restarted. If you are using the Lisp client, update Allegro CL as described above and then restart Allegro CL and connect it to the AllegroGraph server.

Tech Corner Article on Franz.com

http://franz.com/support/tech_corner/heartbleed040914.lhtml

Friday, April 4, 2014

Gruff 5.2 (Now Available) - SPARQL Endpoint Connectivity

Gruff now connects directly to SPARQL Endpoints so you can view a Graph and issue SPARQL queries. The default uses:

http://live.dbpedia.org/sparql



When you're browsing DBPedia, the query view will have a "Sample" button just above the "Do Query" button.  It will paste in one of six (so far) sample queries that it rotates through.  These were selected for producing relatively interesting results and visual graphs.  (Please send us your favorite query and we might include it as a Gruff example.)



Gruff's Graphical query view now has a Sample button too, but only has one example query so far.




Current user will notice the command that was named "Display All Triples (up to a limit)" is now called "Display | Display Some Sample Triples".  It uses the same sample queries as the Sample button in the query view, and so generates the same visual graphs (in DBPedia only).

Also on the Display menu for DBPedia only, the commands to display a node by URI or by label will initially offer a suggestion of an interesting node.

We have employed a few strategies to make creating a visual graph from query results reasonably fast. Instead of asking the server for all of the triples of the nodes in the results, and then selecting from those, it instead deduces some triples that must exist in the store by plugging variable matches into triple patterns from the query.  This way it doesn't need to ask the server for the triples at all.  But it won't find anything for triple patterns in a UNION or the optional part of an OPTIONAL, for example.

This functionality is still in development so we welcome feedback.   If you'd like to unlock this capability please contact us - info@franz.com for the password.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

AllegroGraph 4.13 - Now Available

#AllegroGraph v4.13 is now available for download.



and Much More.........

Product Info:
http://www.franz.com/agraph/allegrograph/

Documentation:
http://www.franz.com/agraph/support/documentation/v4/agraph-introduction.html

Download:
http://www.franz.com/downloads.lhtml