Altova, creator of XMLSpy and other leading XML, data management, UML, and Web services tools, announced a new addition to its award-winning line of XML applications. Altova SemanticWorks 2006 is a visual Semantic Web development tool with support for Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) creation and editing. In line with its tradition of supplying developers with easy-to-use, visual development tools, Altova created SemanticWorks to help customers learn and work with emerging Semantic Web technologies in an intuitive way.

According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Semantic Web is the next evolution in Web technologies. In the Semantic Web, data itself becomes part of the Web and is able to be processed independently of application, platform, or domain. Where the current Web is a collection of documents, the Semantic Web is more like a huge database, in which data on Web pages as well as in databases and other information management systems can be searched, processed, and acted on by machines in meaningful ways. The Semantic Web relies on structured sets of metadata and inference rules that allow it to "understand" the relationship between different data resources. The technologies that form the basis of the Semantic Web by adding these metadata and inference rules are RDF and OWL.

"The Semantic Web gives more meaning to the information available on the Internet and in private data stores," said Tim Hale, Director of Marketing for Altova. "It greatly enhances the relevance and versatility of information accessed via knowledge management and search systems, and opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for intelligent computerized applications. The Semantic Web is a technology whose time has come, and Altova SemanticWorks 2006 makes it a reality for software developers and information architects everywhere."

Altova SemanticWorks allows developers to graphically create and edit RDF instance documents, RDF Schema (RDFS) vocabularies, and OWL ontologies with full syntax checking. Context-sensitive entry helpers present developers with a list of permitted choices based on the RDF or OWL dialect they are using, so they can create valid documents quickly and easily.

In SemanticWorks, developers can switch from the graphical RDF/OWL view to the text view to see how their documents are being built in RDF/XML or N-triples format, and they can export files from RDF/XML to N-triples or vice versa at any time. And, because the RDF/XML or N-triples code is auto-generated based on their design, developers can learn and experiment with the concepts of the Semantic Web without having to write complicated code.