CORALVILLE, IA, March 1, 2010 -- Structured Dynamics (SD) today donated its Open SEAS methodology for Semantic Enterprise Adoption and Solutions to the MIKE2.0 (Method for an Integrated Knowledge Environment) project. Open SEAS provides a framework for an enterprise to establish a coherent, consistent and interoperable semantic layer across its information assets. MIKE2.0 complements that by providing a complete open source delivery environment and methodology for information management projects in the enterprise.

"We had been developing the Open SEAS methodology for over a year," said Michael Bergman, SD's CEO. "While we had been fleshing it out piecemeal through our customer engagements, we lacked a broader context and methodology in which to embed the process. MIKE2.0 provided that; key project leaders also welcomed our contribution with open arms," he added.

Open SEAS follows a number of guiding principles in helping organizations to transition into becoming a semantic enterprise. The combination of its "open-world approach" and RDF data model enables new information to be brought in and incorporated into the framework step-by-step. This allows lower risk, incremental development and agile testing and validation of semantic approaches.

MIKE2.0 and its methodology is organized around "solutions", from the specific to the composite. These are described and packaged with respect to plans, management communications, products (open source and proprietary), activities, benchmarks, and deliverables. Delivery is accomplished over multiple increments, split into five phases from definition and planning to deployment. These assets may be applied to any information management area. The framework allows for multiple projects to be combined and inter-related, all under a common methodology.

"MIKE2.0 is going to 3.0 in terms of its solution approach with this extension and its use of semantic techniques and technologies," said Sean McClowry, Director, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and founder and Executive Director of the MIKE2.0 methodology, and a member of its governing board. "We think Structured Dynamics' Open SEAS is a big step forward and believe client interest along these lines will be keen," he added.

Open SEAS is compliant with the MIKE2.0 Semantic Enterprise Solution Offering. SD developed it for enterprises desiring to initiate or extend their involvement with semantic technologies. According to Bergman, SD developed it to be inherently incremental, low-cost and low-risk.

Structured Dynamics donated this methodology and all of its related intellectual assets in accordance with MIKE2.0's Creative Commons license and content governance policies. MIKE2.0's current 2000+ community members are now free to expand and use the Open SEAS methodology in any manner they see fit.

MIKE2.0 presently has some 800 resources across about 40 solution areas. With Structured Dynamics' donation, there are now about 40 resources related to the semantic enterprise, many of them major, accompanied by many images and figures. This contribution makes the Semantic Enterprise Solution Offering instantly one of the more complete within MIKE2.0.

Bergman's blog post elaborating on the announcement is at http://www.mkbergman.com/868/open-seas-a-framework-to-transition-to-a-semantic-enterprise/.

About MIKE2.0

Method for an Integrated Knowledge Environment (MIKE2.0) is an open source delivery framework for Enterprise Information Management. It provides a comprehensive methodology, backed by a resource-rich and collaborative Web site (http://mike2.openmethodology.org/), that can be applied across a number of different projects within the Information Management space. Key contributing members are BearingPoint, Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCooper.

About Structured Dynamics LLC

Structured Dynamics assists enterprises and non-profit organizations to adopt Web-accessible and interoperable semantic data. The basic premise is that the data itself becomes the application. Via structured, linked data and a combination of semantic technologies and Web services, information in any form and from any source can now be integrated and made interoperable. The company Web site is at http://structureddynamics.com; it is headquartered in Coralville, IA.

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irON Brings Native Spreadsheets, JSON and XML into the Semantic Web

CORALVILLE, IA, October 18, 2009 -- Structured Dynamics today released irON — the instance record and Object Notation — and its family of frameworks and tools into the open source community. SD stated the purpose of irON is to provide simple conventions, a small vocabulary, and free parsers and converters to allow common data formats to become first-class participants on the semantic Web.

"irON is an important piece in the semantic enterprise puzzle that we are building at Structured Dynamics," said Michael Bergman, SD's CEO. "It reflects our belief that knowledge workers should be able to author and create interoperable datasets without having to learn the arcana of RDF."

irON is an abstract notation and associated vocabulary for specifying RDF triples and schema in non-RDF forms. Its purpose is to allow users and tools in non-RDF formats to stage interoperable datasets using RDF. The notation supports three serializations for writing RDF and schema in the formats of: JSON (irJSON); XML (irXML); or, comma-separated values (CSV) via spreadsheets (commON).

The irON specification includes guidance for creating instance records (including in bulk), linkages to existing ontologies and schema, and schema definitions. Data ingested in the irON frameworks can also be exported as RDF and staged as linked data.

"irON and its three serializations can capture virtually the entire scope and power of RDF as a data model, but with the simple and familiar constructs used by each native form," said Fred Giasson, SD's CTO, and co-editor with Bergman for irON. "We used the unique differences amongst XML, JSON and CSV and our intimate knowledge of RDF to guide development of the notation."

Structured Dynamics acknowledged Dr. Jim Pitman and the Bibliographic Knowledge Network (BKN) project (NSF Award 0835851) and its BibJSON format for being a "catalytic influence" on irON's development.

Links and References

The irON release is version 0.8. The irON specification is available at http://openstructs.org/iron/iron-specification, provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. The parsers and converters will be available by mid-week at http://code.google.com/p/iron-notation/, available under the Apache license, version 2.0.

About Structured Dynamics LLC

Structured Dynamics assists enterprises and non-profit organizations to adopt Web-accessible and interoperable data. The basic premise is that the data itself becomes the application. Via structured, linked data and a combination of products and Web services, information in any form and from any source can now be integrated and made interoperable. Linked data is based on open standards to interconnect any form of relevant information on the Web — on demand and in context. The company Web site is at http://structureddynamics.com; it is headquartered in Coralville, IA.

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Experienced Executive Joins SD as Senior Advisor

CORALVILLE, IA, October 1, 2009 -- Structured Dynamics announced today that Steve Ardire has joined its executive management ranks as senior Advisor. For the past 15+ years, Steve has provided incisive business strategy and development, product marketing, and sales consulting services to early stage software startups. His focus is semantic knowledge discovery, enterprise information management, Enterprise 2.0 and related. His strength is to establish value — defined through the customer — as the guiding mind-set for all customer interactions.

"As our technology foundation solidifies, it is time for us to ramp up outreach to Global 2000 companies," said Michael Bergman, Structured Dynamics' CEO. "Steve is a perfect choice for us and extremely knowledgeable in the relatively new semantic enterprise space; we now have the right senior team to expand our market presence," he added.

"I've been actively looking for winning companies and winning strategies targeting the semantic enterprise for nearly five years," said Steve Ardire. "Structured Dynamics has a capability and message across the entire enterprise stack that is among the best I've seen."

Since the early 1990s Ardire has held senior executive, consultant, business development or strategy positions with a slate of advanced software companies, including iQuest Analytics, Trampoline Systems, fourthcodex, Broadstrokes, SchemaLogic, The Kelvin Institute, SCT Global Education Solutions, LifeF/X Networks, Big Science Company, Cartia, Microsoft, and Stellar One Corp. He has been instrumental in setting business development strategies and achieving revenue goals.

Ardire has a BA in geology from Franklin & Marshall College and an MBA from the University of Connecticut. He and his family reside on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state.

About Structured Dynamics LLC

Structured Dynamics assists enterprises and non-profit organizations to adopt Web-accessible and interoperable data. The basic premise is that the data itself becomes the application. Via structured, linked data and a combination of products and Web services, information in any form and from any source can now be integrated and made interoperable. Linked data is based on open standards to interconnect any form of relevant information on the Web -- on demand and in context. The company Web site is at http://structureddynamics.com; it is headquartered in Coralville, IA.

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Structured Dynamics Hosts UMBEL Web Services

CORALVILLE, IA, September 18, 2009 -- Structured Dynamics re-integrated the slate of UMBEL Web services into its Web site today. Fred Giasson, SD's CTO, said about the new integration, "Eight months ago we announced the dissolution of Zitgist LLC, though we kept UMBEL's Web services on a temporary server. This move will make the future upgrade of UMBEL easier, and this will make the maintenance of the Web services endpoints easier as well."

Structured Dynamics LLC now hosts a new version for the UMBEL Web services. From the main menu at the SD Web site you can access these services under the ‘umbel ws’ menu option (you can also bookmark the Web services site at umbel.structureddynamics.com or ws.umbel.org.)

With this move, SD now hosts these five initial Web services and one visualization tool.

Lookup Web Services

• Finder: Subject Concept
• Reporter: Subject Concept

Inference Engine Web Services

• Inference: Lister -- list sub-classes, super-classes and equivalent-classes
• Inference: Validator -- verify sub-class, super-class and equivalent-class relationships

SPARQL endpoint Web Service

• SPARQL Endpoint

Visual Tool

• Subject Concept Explorer

Note that the visual tool is using Moritz Stefaner’s Relation Browser.

About UMBEL

UMBEL (Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer) is a lightweight vocabulary of 20,000 subjects and the conceptual relationships between them. The UMBEL backbone is also a reference structure for more specific vocabularies for interrelating and connecting more specific domains, and can act as binding or attachment points for any Web content or data. It is based on SKOS and derived from the Cyc knowledge base.

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CORALVILLE, IA, June 16, 2009 -- Structured Dynamics today unveiled twin products that will bring exciting new structured data capabilities to the popular Drupal open source content management system. The first of these open source products is structWSF, a platform-independent Web services framework for RDF. It is paired with the conStruct module that links Drupal to this framework while leveraging existing Drupal capabilities.

"There has been some promising effort to expose RDF data from Drupal for some time," said Michael Bergman, CEO of Structured Dynamics LLC. "However, our innovation looks through the other end of the telescope," he said. "Our new conStruct structured content system enables external structured data to actually 'drive the application'. We think Drupal is the perfect host to demonstrate this new paradigm of 'data-driven apps'," Bergman added.

The conStruct Drupal module makes the connections between existing Drupal capabilities and the structWSF Web services framework. structWSF provides a standard suite of Web services, an innovative means to access and manage datasets, and the hooks to underlying structured data stores and full-text search engines.

structWSF

structWSF is a platform-independent Web services framework for accessing and exposing structured RDF data. Its central organizing perspective is that of the dataset. These datasets contain instance records, with the structural relationships amongst the data and their attributes and concepts defined via ontologies (schema with accompanying vocabularies).

The structWSF middleware framework is fully RESTful in design and is based on HTTP and Web protocols and open standards. The initial structWSF framework comes packaged with a baseline set of about a dozen Web services in CRUD, browse, search and export and import.

All Web services are exposed via APIs and SPARQL endpoints. Each request to an individual Web service returns an HTTP status and optionally a document of resultsets. Each results document can be serialized in many ways, and may be expressed as either RDF or pure XML.

In initial release, structWSF has direct interfaces to the Virtuoso RDF triple store (via ODBC, and later HTTP) and the Solr faceted, full-text search engine (via HTTP). However, structWSF has been designed to be fully platform-independent. The framework is open source (Apache 2 license) and designed for extensibility.

conStruct SCS

conStruct SCS is a structured content system that extends the basic Drupal content management framework. conStruct enables structured data and its controlling vocabularies (ontologies) to drive applications and user interfaces.

Users and groups can flexibly access and manage any or all datasets exposed by the system depending on roles and permissions. Report and presentation templates are easily defined, styled or modified based on the underlying datasets and structure. Collaboration networks can readily be established across multiple installations and non-Drupal endpoints. Powerful linked data integration can be included to embrace data anywhere on the Web.

conStruct provides Drupal-level CRUD (create - read - update - delete), data display templating, faceted browsing, full-text search, and import and export over structured data stores based on RDF. Depending on roles and permissions, a given user may or may not see specific datasets or tools within the Drupal interface. Search and browse results are similarly sequestered depending on access rights.

Unveiled at SemTech 2009

Bergman unveiled and demoed the two products today at the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, California. He did so during his talk on, “BKN: Building Communities through Knowledge, and Knowledge Through Communities.” SemTech 2009 is a premier semantic Web event, which has been steadily growing and now exceeds 1000 attendees.

Sponsorship and Further Details

structWSF has been under development by Structured Dynamics for some time. Its linkage and incorporation within the Drupal system has more recently been supported by the Bibliographic Knowledge Network.

BKN is a major, two-year, NSF-funded project jointly sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the American Institute of Mathematics, with broad private sector and community support. BKN is developing a suite of tools and infrastructure for citations and bibliographies within the mathematics and statistics domain based on semantic technologies for professionals, students or researchers to form new communities.

An alpha version of structWSF will released for download from the OpenStruct (http://openstructs.org) Web site on June 30. The conStruct system will be released at the same time under GPL license. See its home site at http://constructscs.com or within the Drupal module system (http://drupal.org/project/construct).

About Structured Dynamics LLC

Structured Dynamics assists enterprises and non-profit organizations and projects to adopt Web-accessible and interoperable data. The basic premise is that the data itself becomes the application. Via structured, linked data and a combination of products and Web services, information in any form and from any source can now be integrated and made interoperable. Linked data is based on open standards to interconnect any form of relevant information on the Web -- on demand and in context. The company Web site is at http://structureddynamics.com; it is headquartered in Coralville, IA.

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