TopQuadrant, a leading semantic solutions company, today announced TopBraid Ensemble and TopBraid Live. With the addition of these new products, TopBraid SuiteT offers organizations the first semantic application environment to cover the entire development and deployment lifecycle.

"We have eliminated the current barrier to semantic application development," said Ralph Hodgson, co-founder of TopQuadrant. "Until now organizations wanting to experience the benefits of semantic technology had to first build their own infrastructure for semantic applications. This is not a trivial task and requires deep expertise in semantic technology, which most companies do not have today. With the introduction of TopBraid Ensemble and TopBraid Live, organizations can focus on creating semantic applications that meet their specific needs without having to build and maintain a development and deployment environment themselves."

Company chief scientist Dean Allemang recently discussed the company's semantic web vision in an exclusive interview with SYS-CON.TV founder and host Roger Strukhoff.

TopBraid Live is an open, standards-based (RDF/S, OWL, SPARQL) client/server platform for the deployment of highly scalable semantic applications. Best-of-breed components can easily be integrated into its open architecture. Key features of TopBraid Live include:

Reusable AJAX-based Components - Includes a library of reusable components for creating semantic data browsing and mashups. The reusable components are light-weight AJAX widgets that can be inserted into web applications and support a semantic server infrastructure. Components come with integrated caching and data access, which simplifies the development of custom components for each task. Components include maps, calendars, a complete Business Intelligence report generator, etc.

Dynamic Connections to Information Sources - Connects to RSS feeds, RDFa, GRDDL, XML, UML models, triple-store databases (AllegroGraph, Jena, Oracle 11g, Sesame), relational databases and spreadsheets.

Flexible Inference Strategy - Fine-tuned control over the selection of standard and non-standard inferences.

Semantic Search - Provides the capabilities to execute semantic searches, allowing users to conduct natural language searches and leverage related concepts based on semantic intelligence.

Web Browser Access - Allows end-users to access semantic applications through a standard web browser.

TopBraid Ensemble is a semantic application for collaborative information management that runs on TopBraid Live. Multiple users can browse and edit content within a semantic application through a graphical user interface.

Dynamic Ontology Forms - Creates suitable entry forms and other means of viewing and entering data using mashup facilities

Multi-user Collaboration - Multiple users can connect to an RDF/OWL model stored on a server and view and edit instances collaboratively.

Ontology-based Search - Facilitates ontology-based search over shared content.

Web Browser Client - Rich graphical user interface accessed through a standard browser.

Customizable Layout - Pre-configured layout and functionality can be customized by adding ready-to-use components. Complimentary components include calendar view, map view, matrix view, reports generated through the integrated BIRT server.

Both TopBraid Live and TopBraid Ensemble integrate seamlessly with TopQuadrant's ontology development tool, TopBraid Composer, according to the company. TopBraid Composer is used to create ontologies and define the layouts of the forms that are used to enter information. These same form layouts are shared by TopBraid Ensemble, giving users a consistent development lifecycle.