AllegroGraph News: Free Webinar: Optimizing SPARQL for Diverse Ontologies

AllegroGraph News, February 24, 2009

In this issue:

1. Free Webinar: Optimizing SPARQL for Diverse Ontologies
2. Conference on Semantics in Healthcare and Life Sciences (C-SHALS)
3. Geographic Information Sciences Conference (TUgis09)
4. The New York Semantic Web Meetup Group
5. AAAI 2009 Spring Symposia
6. Recorded past Semantic Technologies Webinars

1. Free Webinar: Optimizing SPARQL for Diverse Ontologies

11:00 AM Pacific, Thursday, March 5

There are two well known technical issues when reasoning with
ontologies that contain hundreds of thousands of classes/subclasses
and where change happens frequently.

The first problem, materializing type information, takes far too much
time. In some triple stores, materialization takes almost as long as
loading the data. Once an ontology changes, the entire materialization
process has to start over.

The second problem, optimizing a SPARQL engine for a reasoning triple
store, is more challenging than just using SPARQL as a retrieval
language. In a non-reasoning SPARQL engine, optimizing is relatively
straightforward, applying the right hash and sort joins once given the
statistics of the database when it reorders appropriately. However,
when SPARQL is used on top of a reasoner, suddenly additional
considerations are required. In practice, you only know the statistics
of each clause after you have done the reasoning.

This Webinar will discuss a new solution that mitigates or nearly
solves both problems. We will discuss some indexing techniques that do
not require materialization and we will cover how an ordinary
backtracking technique can be very fast with the right reordering.

We will also be previewing some new features in an upcoming 3.2
release of AllegroGraph, query optimizations, and a new web based
graph browser.

Register for this webinar at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/494147427

2. Conference on Semantics in Healthcare and Life Sciences (C-SHALS)

February 25-27, Cambridge/Boston, MA.

This conference focuses on the continued evolution of pharmaceutical
applications using Semantic Technologies. We will be giving a talk on
Optimizing SPARQL for Diverse Ontologies.

For details and registration information:
http://www.iscb.org/cms_addon/conferences/cshals2009/index.php

3. Geographic Information Sciences Conference (TUgis09)

March 16-17, Towson University, MD.

TUgis 2009 will emphasize information sharing, or technology transfer,
by anyone currently using GIS and anyone considering using GIS. The
theme for TUgis 2009 is "Web GIS: New Tools for Data Sharing and
Collaboration." We will be giving a talk, "GeoTemporal Reasoning in a
Web 3.0 World".

For details and registration information:
http://tugis.towson.edu/

4. The New York Semantic Web Meetup Group

March 19, New York City.

This group provides people local to New York a venue to meet others
interested in the Semantic Web, an initiative by the W3C
[http://www.w3c.org] to make the web "one giant database": The Data
Web. We will be giving a talk, "GeoTemporal and Social Network
Reasoning with AllegroGraph".

For details:
http://semweb.meetup.com/25/calendar/9016252/

5. AAAI 2009 Spring Symposia (AAAI-SSS-09), Stanford, CA, March 23-25

AAAI's Spring Symposium Series affords participants a smaller, more
intimate setting. The limited seating capacity and relaxed atmosphere
allow for workshop like interaction. Franz will be participating in
two of the nine symposia this year,

1.) Intelligent Event Processing
http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/sss09symposia.php#ss05

2.) Social Semantic Web: Where Web 2.0 Meets Web 3.0.
http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/sss09symposia.php#ss08

For more information and to register:
http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/sss09.php

6. Recorded past Semantic Technologies Webinars

http://agraph.franz.com/services/conferences_seminars/

Also, you can visit the AllegroGraph Java Edition Learning Center here:
http://agraph.franz.com/support/learning/

Subscribe to Franz RSS feeds:
http://franz.com/rss.lhtml

We welcome your comments. Please reply to this message or send mail
to allegrograph@franz.com.

Best regards,

--
Steve Sears Internet: ssears@franz.com
Product Marketing Manager http: //franz.com/
2201 Broadway, Suite 715 Phone: (510) 452-2000, ext. 154
Oakland, CA 94612 FAX: (510) 452 0182