Thinking Clearly .

Today we announced two big changes to our commercial support plans:

1. We increased coverage to include several new products
2. We decreased prices across all four support levels

We’re expanding of our commercial support plans to include more C&P products, as well as some open source semweb pieces, too:

• Pellet, including support of Pellet apps using Jena and OWLAPI libraries
• Owlgres
• OwlSight
• JSpace
• Protege4

We’ve also gotten feedback from customers and potential customers that the price of our support offerings wasn’t in line with expectations. So we’ve adjusted the price of all four support levels significantly by doubling the number of support hours per level, which more closely mirrors what appears to be a reasonable average for complex open source project support plans.

We’re especially happy to being offering support not only for our reasoners (Pellet and Owlgres) and browsers (OwlSight and JSpace), but also for Protege4. We think its the best open source OWL ontology development environment available. We’ll be offering some commercial plugins for Protege4 in Q3 of this year.

We are proud to announce the first release, version 0.1 (alpha), of Owlgres, a very scalable OWL reasoner that uses Postgres. It implements DL-Lite, a tractable profile of the upcoming OWL 2 standard. Owlgres supports consistency checking and conjunctive query reasoning services—the latter via SPARQL-DL.

Downloads and documentation can be found at the Owlgres site. For bug reports, feel free to open a ticket on our issue tracking site for Owlgres, which also summarizes the first steps with Owlgres on the Wiki page. There’s a mailing list for discussion and support.

Owlgres is dual-licensed; for open source projects, it’s available under the AGPL v.3. For commercial projects, commercial support licenses are available.

We’d love feedback on Owlgres and encourage people to try it out, play with it, and report bugs, issues, and ideas.

Following closely on the heels of the recent release of Pellet 1.5.2, we’ve updated OwlSight. Since OwlSight runs on raw Pellet power, the new version, .52, updates the back-end to take advantage of the recent Pellet release.

If you have not already taken a look at OwlSight, cruise on over to the OwlSight page and take it for a spin. For those not already in the know, OwlSight is a lightweight browser-based ontology browser utilizing both GWT (and GWT-Ext) and Pellet as its core technologies. Until next time, stay classy cyberspace.

Thanks to support from some new friends at Moody’s KMV, we were able to briefly detour off the path to Pellet 1.6 and have released Pellet 1.5.2 as a bug fix release, back-porting many fixes to the 1.5 release tree. Several of the fixes address issues specific to the Jena interface to Pellet, so if you use Pellet from Jena (or TopBraid Composer), this release may be of particular interest to you.

Most of the changes in this release were made to address issues reported by end users – keep up the good work, and we’ll try to keep pace with fixes. You can visit the Pellet trac report listing the resolved issues for full details.

It’s worth noting how this release came about. We had planned for 1.5.1 to be the final release in the 1.5 series. Moody’s contacted us because they had identified a bug that was blocking the critical path of an internal project. We were able to resolve the issue, and they were motivated to have the fix made public in a release that would be a drop-in upgrade of 1.5.1. This is an example of how commercial support can be a multiplier on the value of open source development.

There’s another point to make from this example as well. Often on pellet-users we get help requests from people that are reluctant to make the data they’re working with public. This leads to frustration on both sides – we can’t reproduce the bug without the data and they don’t get a fix. This release demonstrates that this problem is manageable, but it requires these users to contact us and consider the commercial support options.

We expect to rev the public releases of Pronto and OwlSight in the next week to pull in these changes.

Update 18:00 EDT: I’ve sent a release announcement to the mailing list that contains a bit more detail on the specific changes since 1.5.1.

We’re starting to give more talks at more conferences since our SemWeb infrastructure framework—from OWL reasoners and ontology browsers, to RDF linked data browsers, to policy management apps— is really starting to round itself out. Upcoming talks include:

1. 28 April, Boston, BioIT World Conference’s “Harnessing the Semantic Web for Your Organization” workshop . Mike Smith is giving a talk with our NCI customers about how HCLS and other bio orgs can start to take advantage of semantic web stuff.
2. 19 to 21 May, San Jose, Semantic Technology Conference (Bad URL that will break for the 2009 conference; ironic, that!). Evren Sirin, Mike Smith, Pavel Klinov, and I will be giving three talks—Pellet, Pronto, and XACML-DL Policy Analysis. Actually, I’ll be there trying to act “managerial”; I leave the talk-giving to the smart guys.
3. 2 to 4 June, Palisades, NY, POLICY 2008. Markus Stocker and I will be giving a demo talk of XACML-DL, our XACML policy analysis tool.

Upcoming we’re targeting a conference about Ontologies and Model-Driven Architectures (MDA)— which is what OMG is doing now that CORBA is dead-dead-dead—that’s sometime in the fall in Toulouse, which is nice.

One of our new customers—who’s sponsoring a pending Pellet maintenance release, version 1.5.2, that should be out ver soon—is using Pellet to drive a pretty complex code-generation process, and that’s an area where we think Pellet has a huge upside. And we’ve found giving talks and papers with customers as partners is a good pattern.

If you’re planning on attending any of these conferences, shoot me an email as we’d love to chat with users, friends, fans, and interested bystanders.