Northrop Grumman Acquires Proprietary Software from Tucana Technologies

Northrop Grumman Acquires Proprietary Software from Tucana Technologies: "Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) announced that it has purchased the rights to proprietary software developed by Tucana Technologies, a software-products company specializing in using semantic technologies to integrate enterprise information. Northrop Grumman will market these technologies to government and commercial users seeking more efficient methods of sharing business data.

Tucana's software was created for advanced applications that use 'metadata,' or data which describes other information, to integrate information from different sources. This technology is based upon standards established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to form the basis of the 'Semantic Web,' which is the evolving next-generation of the Web. The Semantic Web is being developed through use of common protocol languages so that machines can find, sort and classify information more efficiently.

With the explosive expansion of the digital-data domain, the defense, intelligence, healthcare and financial industries are looking at semantic applications and technologies with great promise for addressing the challenge of "knowledge discovery." Tucana's technologies will enable a new generation of software applications that will allow for the organization and mining of vast amounts of data and deliver the ability to rapidly derive knowledge from previously uncorrelated events. The user communities will move from information processing to knowledge discovery."

NewsForge | Explore the Semantic Web using Piggy Bank

Explore the Semantic Web using Piggy Bank: "If you've ever wondered what all the excitement surrounding the Resource Description Framework (RDF) or the Semantic Web is about, then I have good news. You can explore both without leaving your Web browser, using Piggy Bank.

Piggy Bank is a Java-powered Firefox extension developed by MIT's SIMILE project, a group that is working on a suite of Semantic Web applications and tools. Piggy Bank runs in the background while you browse the Web in your normal fashion. However, when you hit upon a page with an RDF link, a small 'data coin' icon appears in the Firefox status bar. Click on it and Piggy Bank will import and parse the accompanying RDF data. You can search through it via Piggy Bank's built-in browser interface, or save it for later use."