Introducing: Cambridge Semantics and the Open Anzo project

It's been a while since I last posted here to muse about the differences between "the Semantic Web" and "Semantic Web technologies". Since then, I've been quite pleased to see the Linking Open Data project continue to soar, including an extremely successful BoF and panel at WWW 2007 in Banff. New data sources continue to be linked in to the Semantic Web, including data from Wikicompany, flickr, and GovTrack. The project maintains a list and a picture of the growing Web of linked open data.

Meanwhile, I have not been idle in my work to advance Semantic Web technologies inside enterprises. In July, I left IBM and co-founded Cambridge Semantics, Inc. Building upon the work that began with the open-source IBM Semantic Layered Research Platform, Cambridge Semantics is dedicated to building feature-rich semantic middleware that can power a vast breadth of semantic applications that realize the potential of the full stack of Semantic Web technologies.

One of the first things that we've done at Cambridge Semantics is setup the Open Anzo project. Anzo is an open-source fork of Boca, an enterprise RDF store. Anzo starts with the same rich feature set of Boca, including named graphs, replication, notification, access controls, and full revision histories. To this, Anzo (so far) adds a number of bug fixes and support for running on top of an Oracle RDBMS. There's a new release of Anzo coming quite soon, and we're quite excited about some of the current and future development going on for Anzo. To learn more, feel free to join the Open Anzo discussion group, check out the wiki, or download the source or a nightly build. We're also actively looking for like-minded folk to work with us to enhance and improve Anzo and to expand the scope of the project. Let me know if you might be interested in sponsoring, using, or contributing to Anzo.

I'll have a lot more to share about our team, our vision, and our software in the coming weeks and months. It's an exciting time, both for me personally, but more so for the promise of the Semantic Web and Semantic Web technologies. I'm glad to be blogging once more, and look forward to having more to say.