Press Release: Partnership between OpenLink Software and Sindice

Sindice.com: Leading Semantic Data Technology Providers Establish Sindice Ltd.

Sindice launches database-like access to the Web of Data for developers and businesses

Galway, Ireland - 14th June 2011 - For immediate release

An ever-growing number of Web sites contain rich metadata about their page contents, e.g., product prices and features in shopping sites, operating hours information for restaurants, or artist details for concerts. This data is also set to explode as search engines recently agreed on metadata terminology with the schema.org initiative. The resulting "Web of Data" allows for new mobile applications, browser functionality, and search engines. A critical bottleneck for business solutions, however, is a consolidated and customizable way of accessing all of this data at Web scale.

This business need is the target for Sindice.com, the main service provided by Sindice Ltd. With the rich metadata from more than 260 million pages in its index, Sindice.com currently offers the worldÕs largest continuously updated repository of content from the Web of Data, making it available to current and new-generation horizontal and vertical market applications. Key service features include a focused crawler which allows quick but sustainable data-indexing and delta detection, and proprietary data indexes which are updated in realtime.

Today we also announce the latest addition to the Sindice APIs: a Web Scale SPARQL access point. Long-awaited by data-oriented Web developers, this feature eliminates the need to crawl, extract, transform, cleanse, and load data on a per-Web-application basis, thereby allowing third parties to leverage structured data from a vast collection of Websites in their development of novel applications for desktop, mobile, browser, or browser-hosted extensions.

Sindice Ltd. Solidly Backed by Leading Semantic Data Technology Providers

Sindice Ltd. is a newly established enterprise with its headquarters in Galway, Ireland. It is a joint venture by the founders of the Sindice.com team (the DERI research institute at the National University of Ireland Galway and the FBK research institute from Trento Italy), led by Dr Giovanni Tummarello and Dr Renaud Delbru; OpenLink Software Inc., the makers of the Virtuoso Database for InterWeb-scale Linked Data and other leading-edge data-integration technology; and Hepp Research GmbH, leading experts in RDFa and Microdata technology for e-commerce applications, already supported by most major search engines. Sindice Ltd. will have privileged access to relevant expertise and intellectual property from all of its members.

"Sindice.com turns any existing Website offering semantic markup - into a table in a giant Web-scale database," says Dr Giovanni Tummarello, the CEO of Sindice Ltd. "Based on this, Sindice.com offers advanced search functionality, data-cleansing and data-consolidation services, and private data spaces. Sindice.com is also focusing on quite practical products set to immediately reward those who have invested, and are investing, in semantic markup already, for example by adopting GoodRelations for e-commerce pages, Opengraph, or the new Schema.org," he added.

Professor Martin Hepp, the inventor and lead developer of the GoodRelations standard for e-commerce, stresses the potential for targeted shopping, location-based services, and B2B scenarios: "The potential of semantic markup for e-commerce is now firmly recognized by all three major search companies on the planet - after Yahoo (2008) and Google (2010), Bing has recently also announced plans to support the GoodRelations standard. Today's search engines, however, harvest only the tip of the iceberg of this data, solely for a better rendering of their search results. Sindice's technology allows much more sophisticated novel commerce applications." Prof. Hepp is backing Sindice Ltd. via his Hepp Research GmbH, a semantic-data consulting firm.

"Highly scalable and semantically rich linked data spaces have been a pragmatic pursuit at OpenLink Software for a long time," says Kingsley Idehen, its Founder and CEO. "Tuning and delivering linked data spaces as big, data-oriented cloud services is extremely challenging. With Sindice, we deliver live Data as a Service (DaaS), in a way that will provide tremendous strategic advantages to the users of Semantic technologies at InterWeb and Enterprise scales", he explains. "Web-scale semantic data spaces have been discussed for ages," he continues, "but tuning the technology and allowing cloud scalability is still extremely difficult. Sindice Ltd. will provide effortlessly scalable live semantic data spaces to enable a new wave of data intelligence in applications and within enterprises."

Contact Details

Sindice Ltd.
DERI IDA Business Park
Lower Dangan
Galway
Ireland
http://sindice.com/

OpenLink Software Inc.
10 Burlington Mall Road
Suite 265
Burlington, MA 01803
U.S.A.
http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/

Hepp Research GmbH
Karlstrasse 8
88212 Ravensburg
Germany
http://www.heppresearch.com/