Oracle and Its Semantic Technologies Center
April 7, 2010
In the course of a research project for a client, we came across the Oracle Semantic Technologies Center. We had heard that Oracle had some testing underway with Siderean Software (now in hiatus) in the semantic technology field. According to Oracle:
Oracle Spatial 11g introduces the industry’s first open, scalable, secure and reliable RDF management platform. Based on a graph data model, RDF triples are persisted, indexed and queried, similar to other object-relational data types. The Oracle 11g RDF database ensures that application developers benefit from the scalability of Oracle 11g to deploy scalable and secure semantic applications.
There are links to a life sciences “platform” which offers a presentational, some white papers, and product brochures. One of the more interesting documents explains the Oracle “platform”. You can download the presentation (validated on April 6, 2010) here. The system includes references to known technologies like table spaces and to some methods that seem to be getting long in the tooth, for example, hand crafted rules for Oracle streams. The presentation has a date of 2006, which makes me wonder if Oracle has pulled resources from this initiative. The presentation includes information about Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, another product about which we wonder about Oracle’s investment and commitment. The information about vast quantities of data does not include information about the hardware scaling products based on Sun Microsystems’ technologies. Despite its 2006 date, the presentation is quite complete and is an excellent yardstick against which to measure the more up to date information about Oracle. Despite the marketing, Oracle’s platform strikes us as mostly unchanged in the last few years. Your view may differ, of course.
The semantic splash page does provide links to information about Oracle 11g. The September 2009 write up “Oracle Semantic Technologies Inference Best Practices with RDFS/OWL” focuses on system performance. The white paper begs the question, “If the performance referenced in this white paper is as stated, why does an Oracle customer need the new generation of Exadata Storage Servers?”
After working through the information available from the Semantic Technologies Center, I formed an impression of broad marketing statements and specific detail about the performance of the Oracle systems. What seemed to be missing were updates to some critical documents and an way to figure out how the many moving parts fit together to solve a specific semantic problem.
Worth bookmarking if you are working with Oracle search or semantic systems, however.
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2010
No one paid us to write this article.
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One Response to “Oracle and Its Semantic Technologies Center”
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Hi Stephen,
Great post as usual! MIKE2.0 has recently entered the Semantic space alongside Structured Dynamics that could benefit from some of the work Oracle is doing. It’s a work in progress and open to comments and suggestions: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/Guiding_Principles_for_the_Open_Semantic_Enterprise
We will definitely plan to bookmark this post for our members in the semantic space.