Friday, August 24, 2012

Gruff v4 - Now Available


Franz Inc., the leading supplier of Graph Database technology for the Semantic Webtarget blank image., 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 Gruffҳ 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! 2012target blank image. conference in San Jose, CA.

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