OpenLink as integration partner

OpenLink's Virtuoso universal server as tool for semantic integration.

It is always dangerous to publish a preference for a technology partner.

One makes 1 friend for many dissatisfied relations.

Why bother thus ?

Let's recall the goals for knowledge collection, -management and -production in the form of data models.

Those are the risk reduction by knowledge management and production control.

The knowledge management having the ontology as tool, the production control is obtained by transforming the knowledge into production processes.

We want to make sure the investment in the knowledge part is paying off also by transformation of the knowledge into production processes.

Some scientific sectors may have higher requirements on calculation power, overall, the finance industry is the most demanding industry in the field of IT service levels.

I witnessed myself huge projects failing because of performance.

Therefore I understand the suspicious approach of IT people with new technologies.

With Virtuoso, we are confident offering a feasible solution which can be tailored to the needs of almost all financial institutions.

The reasons for choosing OpenLink's Virtuoso are the following:

Performance.
After 6 months of testing, we found the quad store (triple store + graph identification) the best performance in response time, transaction time and mass loads. Of course we also looked at the LUMB figures, which are excellent for Virtuoso, but they do not tell the full story on the overall performance. The servers are written in C. The user interfaces are extremely fast in response seen the technology by means of:

VSP (Virtuoso Server Pages): a combination of HTML and similar representation formats on one side, compiled C and SPARQL (or SQL92) procedures on the other side.
VSPX: like VSP but the HTML is replaced with XHTML and the widgets for data representation are richer while they can be created by code.
OAT: AJAX asynchronous communication possibilities. Together with OAT, Fresnel lenses are available.

DBPedia knowledge base is administered in Virtuoso. Try the SPARQL queries for yourself.

We tested the user interfaces pure, without content management systems and their databases.

The standards and nothing but combinations of pure standards
Whether we speak about RDF, n3, XML, SPARQL, SQL, C, C#, SOAP, WSDL, XSLT (+Xquery & Xpath), ... there is no cheating.
It are the standards without own additions/proprietary versions/transformations.
This makes the developments portable and thus independent of the software provider.
Developments on the OpenLink systems will not be lost.
The management is committed to semantic technologies and permanently on the edge of technology.
It makes quite a difference whether the supplier follows a trend because the customers require some features compared to the managers which drive new technologies to a point of pragmatic implementation. This implementation can be performed with such an enthusiasm, so that the implementation overrules the theoretical expectations.
That feeling is present with OpenLink.
The possibility to test via the open source version of Virtuoso. Also the support which users get (even for the open source version without having paid a penny) creates goodwill because one feels the drive to reach for perfection in these pioneering days.
Please feel at ease, pioneering does not mean customers are guinea pigs. The technology is mature for implementation.
Financial institutions are invited to join early enough since the reasons for features are clearer by being part of the solution.
Universal server. The servers are many and integrated: web server, SOAP & WSDL, news and mail server, database server, data spaces,... Data is accessible via the newest and oldest of technology meaning the temporization of transformation is flexible.
A traditional approach to software development as well as the most performing SOA integrated in a semantic environment is available.
The application of different new technologies embedded in an advanced environment makes a transformation flexible from methodology perspective.
Middleware function: linked data via legacy ODBC drivers, dataspaces, Webdav integrations,...This means the new technologies implementation can be spread over time from the perspective of accessibility while connections to traditional entity/relationship systems remain open and the data exploitable.
Security. The security functions on the level of transaction management, the physical storage, the connection and transfers are well organized and monitored. Those are particularly important for the finance industry.

The full of the possibilities of OWL is not ready implemented.

With more limited knowledge bases, inferences are performed by reasoners or (SWRL) rule systems.

Other database suppliers apply a strategy of own rule engines or they run inferences as a batch program, once a day, after closing hours.

No engine today can cope with the massive data volumes in finance industry.

An option to batch run inferences is simply not conceivable for all operations in the finance industry. Only for static data this might be possible under certain conditions.

The solution in Virtuoso when the inference is not available is obtained through advanced SQL applications in SPARQL, xslt adaptation, sponger cartridges and compiled functions and procedures.

Further, the plans to include support for the newest version of OWL in Virtuoso are concretized, which would take the software again to the edge of industrial scale technologies. We know that what we need is present in the rdf store.