New partner for ontology engineering and training

Dr. Johannes Busse worked for ontoprise as a senior researcher from 2006 to 2010. In April 2010 he started his own business "jbusse.de knowledge engineering". Apart from ontology engineering, consulting and training services related to F-logic and ObjectLogic, he offers to care for and maintain the customer ontologies delivered by ontoprise in the past. He focuses on enriching the existing customer ontologies with new (and mostly free) semantic resources available on the web, like i.e. SKOS-Thesauri for document indexing. Even simple ontology maintenance may add reasonable value it, especially as customers have already invested in the semantic technologies.

For further information about his work and the offered trainings visit his website.

Rule Interchange Format

Again ontoprise emphasizes its position as a leading semantic web technology vendor by early adopting important standards: OntoBroker 5.3 – released in June 2009 – is the first commercial product supporting RIF (Rule Interchange Format) world-wide.
RIF is the major standardization effort of the W3C for a web-aware rule language framework. The RIF working drafts provide a well defined semantics as well as an XML based file format enabling easy exchange of rules between rule systems such as OntoBroker.

OntoBroker 5.3 allows importing and exporting of RIF/XML documents. It supports most of BLD – the Basic Logic Dialect – defined by the RIF Working Group. BLD provides Horn rules plus some syntactic sugar like frames taken from F-logic.
BLD is designed as a basic rule language, restricting to language elements which are common. While Horn rules are widely used, RIF includes more sophisticated concepts such as default negation. A perfect match for ontoprise since ObjectLogic – ontoprise's F-logic 2 derivate – also goes for default negation giving an intuitive approach on modeling complex rules.

Additional rule language elements such as equivalence and forall quantification in rule bodies are included in OntoBroker's RIF support. For further reading refer to our online manual.

General Electric selects SemanticGuide as a corporate standard for providing intelligent advisory systems for Jenbacher

Jenbacher, GE's gas engine division, has selected ontoprise as supplier for an expert system to improve their worldwide customer service. The software system, Service Expert System (SES), is a service advisory system based on the proven SemanticGuide from ontoprise. SES will be an important part of the Jenbacher product line improvements to their worldwide customer service. For GE (General Electric) a main feature of the system was SES ability to be mobile and used offline. The worldwide Jenbacher service team will now be able to access the company knowledge base on their laptop without needing an online connection.

"The fact that a global company such as GE has chosen SemanticGuide as a standard application shows the reputation that ontoprise now holds in the market. Our technology turns the knowledge held by a normal service technician to that of an expert. This gives immeasurable value to companies with huge worldwide service network", says Hans-Peter Schnurr, CEO of ontoprise.

"SemanticGuide from ontoprise contributes to further optimise our customer service. The solution allows us to transfer knowledge very quickly to our global service teams which leads to faster troubleshooting, and thus higher customer satisfaction", added Axel Dancker, Global Service Leader Jenbacher gas engines, GE Energy.

Read the full press release. More information about the SemanticGuide system can be found on our website.

CeBIT 2010: Derive new business insights from you unstructured information

At this year's CeBIT, ontoprise shows along with development partner IBM a brand new business analytics solution. Semantic Content Analytics (SCA), a joint development from IBM and ontoprise, allows important concepts and relationships to be extracted from your content, both structured (databases) and unstructured (documents, web pages, e-mails, news feeds, etc.), and used within business rules to derive deep insights to better inform your business decisions. The solution will be presented the first time to a broad audience and combines the capabilities of IBM Cognos Content Analytics (CCA) with those of ontoprise’s OntoBroker.

If you are interested visit us at our demo point at IBM’s main booth in Hall 2, Stand A10, Demo Point 71. If you wish to make an appointment, just write an email at cebit@ontoprise.de.

You'll find further information about SCA at our website.

Neuer Partner: Information Management Group

IMG, die Consulting Services der S&T Gruppe, ist neuer Partner der ontoprise GmbH. IMG ist Spezialist für die Erarbeitung und Umsetzung internationaler, unternehmensübergreifender Geschäftsmodelle in Prozessen und Systemen. Durch die Partnerschaft mit ontoprise erweitert IMG sein eigenes Leistungsangebot mit semantischen Produkten und Lösungen.

Beispielsweise werden für den Automobil-Bereich – aber auch in weiteren Branchen – innerhalb von Planungs- und Management-Software (unter anderem von SAP)Ratgeberfunktionen oder Möglichkeiten eines Condition Based Monitoring benötigt. Auf Basis eines Wissensnetzes (Ontologie) erfolgt eine schnelle und zielgerichtete Auswertung dieser Daten. "Mit den Lösungen von ontoprise können wir unseren Kunden im Vergleich zum Wettbewerb einen echten Mehrwert bieten", so Dr.-Ing. Axel Poestges von IMG.

Weitere Informationen finden Sie auf unserer Webseite.

New OntoBroker 5.3.3 und OntoStudio 2.3.3

We’re happy to announce our new OntoBroker 5.3.3 und OntoStudio 2.3.3 maintenance releases. These releases close 25 minor tickets and improve ActiveDirectory support within OntoBroker.

For an update to your software please contact the ontoprise support-team: support@ontoprise.com.

Thanks to all of you for a great 2009! It was a pleasure working with you.
The whole ontoprise team wishes you a Merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous 2010.

New ontoprise Partner: Innosoft GmbH

Through partnering with the German company Innosoft GmbH, ontoprise yet again expands its broad partner network. Innosoft GmbH develops project and service management systems that rationalize operations in companies. Innosoft offers a wide range of services from design, development through to fully hosted customer service centers.

Hans-Peter Schnurr, ontoprise CEO, sees many benefits from this partnership: "With the portfolio of Innosoft GmbH, we are now able to offer our customers the option to significantly increase the operational and technical efficiency of their employees."

The software developed by Innosoft offers a range of features that can deliver accurate cost estimates, detailed schedules and effective capacity management in the service call environment. It provides an efficient tool for controlling and planning even the most complex service calls. It is planned to fully integrate SemanticGuide with this software so that the knowledge of experts (which symptoms have occurred, what actions could resolve the problem, which action was successful, etc.) can be collected and then processed by the intelligent problem diagnosis model. This ability to have a continuous flow of information through the combined solution will greatly improve the initial fix rate of a service center. The combination of Innosoft project management software with ontoprise SemanticGuide will also significantly increase the technical competence of the service employees and therefore help to improve customer satisfaction.

With more than 250 customers in the field of engineering Innosoft GmbH is one of the leading German companies for project and service management systems.

For more information about Innosoft please visit their website: www.innosoft.de/Englisch/.

Triathlon: Steffen Haak achieved an excellent 5th Place at the Ironman in Hawaii

In one of our earlier posts, we briefly introduced Steffen Haak and the fact that ontoprise were sponsoring him to take part at the Ironman in Hawaii this October. We are proud to announce that Steffen had great success in the competition: He achieved an excellent 5th place in his age group (25-29 years) which means he came 55th overall - congratulations!

For more information about Steffen Haak adventures please visit: www.ontoprise.de/en/home/news/news-en/ontoprise-supports-local-triathlet/

ontoprise is ready to offer Windows 7 benefits within OntoStudio 2.3.2

The latest version of OntoStudio, a professional modeling environment for ontologies, has earned the “Compatible with Windows 7” logo to provide users higher security, innovative user interfaces features and a better reliability.

After the Semantics for SharePoint framework passed the compatibility test from Microsoft Corp. for Windows Server 2008 the current OntoStudio 2.3.2 is now compatible with Windows 7. OntoStudio is a modeling environment for building and maintaining ontologies. It is characterized by extensive features for intuitive ontology modeling, and provides a variety of import capabilities of already existing structures, schemas and models. OntoStudio supports all W3C Semantic Web recommendations for modeling ontologies in OWL, RDF, RDFS, and SPARQL.

More information can be found on our website.