Aduna has launched new versions of its software suite, just in time for spring: AutoFocus 2005.1, Spectacle 2005.1 and Metadata Server 2005.1.
All of these tools are RDF-based: AutoFocus is a visual desktop search application that internally stores its data in a Sesame store and uses SeRQL queries to drive the user interface. The Metadata Server is an extension of Sesame that crawls and indexes data and stores it - you guessed it - in RDF. Spectacle is an enterprise search application that is driven by a Metadata server in the backend.
So why do we use RDF to drive search? Why not simply use an indexer, like Lucene, to store and retrieve keyword data? The answer is that, although such indexers are very performant, they are not databases. We actually started out this way, in early versions of the software. The switch to RDF and Sesame as the main storage facility was driven by a need for flexibility in both software architecture and data modeling, and more specifically, flexibility with respect to customer requirements.
Aduna's customers are typically organizations that have their own domain knowledge, and the use of Sesame and RDF as the backend store that drives all our tools makes it easy for us to customize the suite to incorporate, for example, enterprise-specific metadata and enterprise-specific navigation facilities.
Long story short: RDF helps us help our customers better. Who'da thunk it?
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Aduna launches its spring collection
Aduna has launched new versions of its software suite, just in time for spring: AutoFocus 2005.1, Spectacle 2005.1 and Metadata Server 2005.1.
All of these tools are RDF-based: AutoFocus is a visual desktop search application that internally stores its data in a Sesame store and uses SeRQL queries to drive the user interface. The Metadata Server is an extension of Sesame that crawls and indexes data and stores it - you guessed it - in RDF. Spectacle is an enterprise search application that is driven by a Metadata server in the backend.
So why do we use RDF to drive search? Why not simply use an indexer, like Lucene, to store and retrieve keyword data? The answer is that, although such indexers are very performant, they are not databases. We actually started out this way, in early versions of the software. The switch to RDF and Sesame as the main storage facility was driven by a need for flexibility in both software architecture and data modeling, and more specifically, flexibility with respect to customer requirements.
Aduna's customers are typically organizations that have their own domain knowledge, and the use of Sesame and RDF as the backend store that drives all our tools makes it easy for us to customize the suite to incorporate, for example, enterprise-specific metadata and enterprise-specific navigation facilities.
Long story short: RDF helps us help our customers better. Who'da thunk it?
Thursday, March 03, 2005
Sesame 1.1.1 and Rio 1.0.1 released
Sesame 1.1.1 is a bugfix release. It includes several fixes for issues with release 1.1, and a number of performance improvements. See the Sesame ChangeLog or the Release Notes for details.
Rio 1.0.1 fixes a number of bugs that were identified in 1.0. See the Rio Changelog or the Release Notes for details. Rio 1.0.1 is bundled with Sesame 1.1.1, but can also be downloaded separately.