For Immediate Release

Contact:
Steve Sears
Product Marketing Manager
ssears@franz.com
510-452-2000 x.154

Franz Announces the Release of AllegroGraph v2.0 - The Web 3.0 Database

May 20, 2007: Franz, Inc. today announced the release of version 2.0 of the AllegroGraph 64-Bit RDFStore with features to make Web 3.0 applications a reality. AllegroGraph is a high-performance persistent database for storing and querying billions of RDF triples. Many enterprises are using AllegroGraph to realize their Semantic Web applications today.

The emergence of Web 3.0 has created a wave of enthusiasm for delivering nascent web applications to the world. Led by the W3C and envisioned by World Wide Web inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, the Semantic Web is driven by standards that will turn the Web essentially into one giant database. This will permit computers to read and understand Web pages much as we humans read them thus allowing applications to find, share and integrate information much more easily than what's feasible today.

While waiting for the grand vision of "Semantic Web" to materialize, enterprises begin utilizing the same technologies and standards for knowledge representation, knowledge access and discovery. Enterprise data, when imbued with semantics (meaning), also greatly enhances information interoperability and syndication. Companies, such as Kodak and GSK Pharmaceutical, have already employed such technology to great effect for personal and enterprise knowledge management. This Semantic Technology and the vision of Semantic Web in essence are the twin engines of the Web 3.0 movement.

AllegroGraph v2.0 introduces many features for creating Web 3.0 applications, including native data types, range queries, named graphs, distributed databases, built-in reasoning along with efficient handling of geospatial and temporal data types. AllegroGraph v2.0 makes it possible to work with billions of triples using clusters of commodity hardware. AllegroGraph version 2.0 supports both a Java API and an HTTP interface that talk to any language (such as Ruby and Python) supporting HTTP client requests.

According to Dr. Jans Aasman, Director of Engineering at Franz, "As semantic technology starts moving from research labs to real-world applications, the size and complexity of the RDF data will explode exponentially. AllegroGraph is the first persistent RDF Store to scale to billions of triples that makes it feasible to create practical Web 3.0 applications".

Franz Inc., (http://franz.com) based in Oakland, California, is the leading vendor of dynamic object-oriented development tools and object databases, featuring Allegro CL/CLOS, AllegroCache and AllegroGraph. Founded in 1984 and privately held, Franz Inc. has been serving customers worldwide with industry-leading technologies since its inception.