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.

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.

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.

There is a new W3C Semantic Web Education Outreach (SWEO) use case online for POPS, our expertise location service built on top of jSpace for our friends at NASA. The use case describes in detail what POPS is, design issues and decisions, how it’s being used at NASA, and includes some screenshots. There is some good information for anyone who wants to learn more about POPS and jSpace, and how Semantic Web technology is being used at NASA, so please, check it out.

Last week POPS—the expertise location service we built for NASA—went into production as an Agency-wide application; it’s thought to be the first “institutional” (that is, business) Semantic Web app deployed Agency-wide at NASA. (I should emphasize that no one really knows whether POPS is the first; but we believe it to be and for good reasons.)

We’re very proud of this accomplishment. It’s proof that SemWeb technologies like RDF and SPARQL are useful for building solutions to information integration problems. We’re also proud because it proves what Bijan Parsia, Andy Schain (NASA HQ CTO), and I thought about this problem from the first time we talked about it in 2005: expertise location is a kind of information integration problem.

And despite all the OWL—and, especially, OWL DL—work we do, this demonstrates that we’re also a pretty good “shallow end” SemWeb app company, too.

We don’t yet know how successful POPS will be at NASA, but if it’s successful, it will be so for two reasons: First, it’s really just a visual query builder for an RDF aggregation that we’ve tricked people into using by building a user interface that reminds people of iTunes—and we owe this to one of our fav HCI researchers, m.c. schrafel and her mspace tool. Second, because C&P Employee #1, Mike Grove, will have, often by sheer force of will, made it a success by writing a ton of good, clean, interesting code; by doing an inordinate amount of project management; and, third, by being goddam unflappable under pressure.

At the launch party for POPS, lots of people were giving and taking credit for it—I don’t disagree with a word of it. Neither Mike nor I said much about any of that because, well, that’s pretty boring. But if someone had asked me, I would have said what I know to be true: POPS is Mike Grove’s baby and it’s all grows up.