With version 5.1, the Triple Store OntoBroker RDF can transform between OWL, RDF, and F-Logic via the same ontology management API so users can choose the right ontology language for the right task. It also provides improved multi-core performance.

A new collaboration server lets OntoBroker acts as the central server with remote access to allow for the distributed usage, management, and editing of ontologies, and for collaborative modeling with OntoStudio 2.1, the vendor says.

OntoStudio itself offers new features, including the ability to separate schema and facts and re-use central elements in different ontologies, and an improved mapping tool to help knowledge engineers quickly map heterogeneous data sources, the company says.

The company also announced that it will be developing an expert system for the largest hydroelectric power plant in Southeast Asia. The expert system from Ontoprise called CEXS (Computer Guided Shell Expert System) will support the operating staff of the Bakun hydroelectric plant in Malaysia in the detection of possible malfunctions, helping to avoid outages by the use of rules and expert knowledge, Ontoprise says.

Capable of storing and querying billions of RDF statements, the company says the product provides customers an events-based view (what type of event, who was there, start and end time, and location) of data sets, with the goal of helping them speedily link various pieces of information and reason through it.

The vendor also is aiming at helping developers learn how to create scalable applications for the semantic web: It has introduced a new Learning Center for that purpose, and to help drive understanding of RDF database technologies and best practices for its software.

"We are confident that Expozé's niche technology is the missing piece for overcoming the semantic mediation bottleneck on the semantic web," said Mala Mehrotra, president and CEO of Pragati, in a statement. The vendor has customers in both the emergency management and military sectors.

These are the Mulgara semantic store (a scalable RDF data store, written in Java and designed to scale to hundreds of millions of RDF statements) and Aduna's Sesame Version 2.2, an open source Java framework for the storage, inferencing and querying of RDF data.

David Wood, a Zepheira partner and Mulgara project member, said in a statement that he sees tremendous value in the integration of the projects, their developers and their communities of users.

"The comprehensive set of APIs and standards from Sesame along with the scalability and speed of Mulgara gives developers a single port of call for Semantic Web projects of all levels," said Paul Gearon, founder and leader of the Mulgara Project, in a statement. "We have now combined the experience and skills of the developers from both projects, giving us much greater capacity for ongoing development than when our efforts were split between unrelated systems."