For Immediate Release

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

Franz Announces AllegroGraph Java Edition ^TM for Processing Billions of RDF Triples

Oakland, CA , November 5, 2006: Franz, Inc. today announced the release of AllegroGraph Java Edition, with support for SPARQL. AllegroGraph is a high-performance, persistent triple store for saving and querying billions of RDF triples in real-time.

The Semantic Web RDF standard from W3C has made increasing inroads into government, enterprises, bioinformatics, and telecommunications. Its simplicity and flexibility makes it suitable to represent any structured or unstructured information. However, for real-world applications the number of RDF triples can easily grow into hundreds of millions or even billions, making it difficult to process efficiently with traditional tools such as relational or object databases. Faced with this challenge, Franz leveraged its 20+ years of experience with persistent dynamic object technology to engineer a massively scalable persistent triple store - AllegroGraph. AllegroGraph is unparalleled in its scalability and speed to load, store, and query data, often an order of magnitude faster than other persistent solutions.

According to Fritz Kunze, President and CEO at Franz, "As semantic technology starts moving from research labs to enterprise applications, the size and complexity of the RDF data will explode exponentially. The current in-memory RDF systems are no longer practical, and most persistent solutions are too slow or too limited in scale to be viable. AllegroGraph is the first persistent RDF Store to scale to billions of triples while maintaining a speed closer to that of in-memory solutions."

Key to this release, TopQuadrant has updated its enterprise ontology-modeling platform, TopBraid Composer, to work directly with AllegroGraph. With such an integration, users of TopBraid Composer can now store and query their ontology model and data very efficiently, with a world-class triple store, while AllegroGraph users gain an interactive graphical platform to develop their semantic models. According to Ralph Hodgson, an Executive Partner and pioneering semantic technology consultant at TopQuadrant, "For many of our clients semantic web technology is now transitioning from a proof of concept stage where its viability and value have been demonstrated to where they are eager to deploy important applications and enterprise scale solutions. Complete platforms, integrated architecture and scalable components are critical for enterprise level deployments. TopBraid Suite is based on the 'plug and play' open architecture making it possible to easily plug in best of breed components. The integration of TopBraid Composer and AllegroGraph represents a key milestone to enabling deeper commitments and larger scale investments in semantic web solutions."

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.

TopQuadrant is a leading semantic web solutions company providing services, trainings, resources and products for developing ontologies and implementing Semantic Web solutions. TopQuadrant is an active participant in W3C activities bringing W3C standards into real world practice in enterprise applications.

Additionally, Franz is releasing AllegroGraph Free Java Edition, that will work with up to 50 million triples, as a free download. For more information, please visit AllegroGraph. For more information about all Franz Inc. products and services, call (888)-CLOS NOW or +1-510-452-2000, or send email to info@franz.com. Allegro CL is a registered trademark of Franz Inc. Other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners.