News
ONTOLOGY WORKS BECOMES HIGHFLEET, INC. - JANUARY 15, 2010
A message from President/CEO, Michael Davis.
Ontology Works has grown up. In the early days of the Company it was important to emphasize our unique capabilities by invoking "Ontology". But Ontology, the discipline with its roots in rigorous Philosophy and Logic, while being crucial to the creation of the rich, contextual models that are superior in content and expressivity to old fashioned data models, is not sufficient to explain what makes HIGHFLEET unique. Many individuals, universities and firms create ontologies. Some of these are good, but many are bad, just as there are good and bad data models. Many of these creations are not ontologies, but simple taxonomies or in many cases just lists of words! So we want to get some distance from these efforts that appropriate the word 'ontology' without a deep understanding of what that means. By contrast, HIGHFLEET, as Ontology Works, is approaching ten years of deep technical development in what the market is calling 'semantic technologies'. We are not new to this field and we carefully matured our capabilities and products before placing more emphasis on marketing. But creating ontologies is not what our Company is about. We want to move the discussion away from the subject of Ontology in order to emphasize what we do rather than how we do it. We are focused on using these high-fidelity domain models to do important and valuable work for enterprises of all kinds. As part of this emphasis, we are changing our name and have chosen HIGHFLEET to reflect a positive image that is coherent with our long standing airship imagery and logo.
The real genius of HIGHFLEET is that we instantiate these rich, contextual domain models (ontologies) in our family of ontology-based deductive databases - the eXtensible Knowledge Servers (XKS). Our XKS computes efficiently over these models and large data sets. That is, we answer complex queries and we answer them rapidly. This ability to support efficient reasoning in the XKS, that is, rapid deductive inference over domain models (ontology + controlling logic) and data, is a strategic achievement. This capability, housed in the XKS in our 'stack' of Query Analyzer, Query Optimizer and Reasoner, greatly advances what is possible in information systems, making the relational database obsolete for high-value problems. Our eXtensible Knowledge Server products deliver a significant knowledge discovery capability, since a query in our system will launch thousands to tens of thousands of additional queries, giving a chain of inference that is a force multiplier for discovery and analysis. And it is also no longer necessary to use the large, brittle and expensive applications that are necessary with traditional 'dumb' databases. With our XKS, light weight and easily modified applications can be used since so much 'smarts' are in the XKS itself. The answers to the hard questions that support high-value decision making can now be found.
But these 'clean sheet' XKS solutions are not our only offering. Using important modifications of our core capabilities, HIGHFLEET created a solution for the semantic federation of legacy databases that gives a vastly superior result over traditional methods of database federation for a much lower cost. Our semantically federated database solution presents the enterprise user with a system that acts like a single coherent XKS with knowledge discovery across the federated resources.
We also work with other firms to embed our capabilities in their software and solutions. With our capabilities enhancing their solutions, such firms obtain powerful discriminators and competitive advantage.
As I said, Ontology Works has grown up and as HIGHFLEET supports clients from Canada to the United Kingdom. We are seeing significant growth in 2009 and expect further rapid growth in 2010. HIGHFLEET is supporting efforts in Social Network Analysis, database federation, decision support, technical network analysis, manufacturing management, and unique solutions for the proper access and control of personal information. This last capability has enormous applicability in government and commercial enterprises and will be crucial to digital medical records systems. And we see a growing number of firms are embedding our capabilities in their products to give them important discriminators. We are not a niche capability. If you need to retrieve data, use a database. If you need to answer hard questions that support crucial decision making in the enterprise, if you need to ask about something, not just for something, then you need HIGHFLEET. Anyone can retrieve data. With HIGHFLEET the enterprise can easily determine what their data means.
ONTOLOGY WORKS & PURUS TECHNOLOGIES INC LEAD NEXT GENERATION ENTERPRISE DECISION MANAGEMENT
Baltimore, Dec 1st /CNW/ - - Ontology Works Inc., a semantic technology company located in Baltimore Maryland, today announced a partnership with PURUS Technologies Inc. (PURUS) of Calgary, Alberta, Canada that both companies promise will lead the next generation of Enterprise Decision Management.
The partnership between OW and PURUS will integrate Ontology Worksʼ flagship ontology-based deductive database software with its highly efficient inference capability as well as Ontology Worksʼ Semantic Federation Solution for legacy databases with PURUSʼ Decision Catalyst Framework. This combination will create a revolutionary approach to Enterprise Decision Management.
