Franz Inc., the leading supplier of Graph Database technology for the Semantic Web, today announced Gruff v5.0, the industry’s leading RDF browser to view graph data, explore connections within data, and visually build queries without writing code.

The free-form nature of Graph style data offers a lot of flexibility for connecting data, but that freedom can also make it more challenging to find interesting patterns or simply navigate through your data. It has become typical for RDF data sets to contain thousands of classes and relationship types, making it hard to even formulate the analytics and queries a user wants to perform.

Gruff, a visual analytics and discovery tool, was developed by Franz to specifically address these Graph data challenges in large data sets. Gruff lets users intelligently explore graphs in multiple views:

• Graphical View - See the shape and density of the graph data

• Tabular view - Understand objects as a whole

• Outline view - Explore the often hierarchical nature of graphs

• Query view - Write Prolog or SPARQL queries

• Graphical Query Builder - Create queries visually via drag and drop

The new Gruff v5.0 uniquely offers users a powerful capability to mark an interesting visual pattern in the Graphical View and convert that automatically into a textual SPARQL or Prolog query. This query code generator operating in conjunction with new zoom in - out controls on Gruff's large graph visualization engine provides users with an unmatched graph discovery tool.

“Gruff allows for easy viewing of graph style data and provides an easy on-ramp for non-technical users to engage the Semantic Web,” said Dr. Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz Inc. “Users can easily create queries visually without knowing the query language of the Semantic Web – SPARQL, which further empowers the business user for this technology.”

Gruff v5.0 is available as a free download from the Franz website – http://www.franz.com/agraph/gruff. The product runs on Mac OSX, Windows, Linux and is offered as a standalone application or client-server for remote users.

Franz Inc. will be hosting a Webcast on April 24th at 10AM PST - Gruff Version 5 - Tips and Tricks to become a Power User. To register - http://www.franz.com/ps/newsletter-swt.lhtml

Dr. Aasman will discuss the capabilities of AllegroGraph and Gruff at the Enterprise Data World conference, April 30th, in San Diego, as well as the Semantic Technology and Business Conference, June 2nd, in San Francisco.

About Franz Inc.

Franz Inc. is a leading vendor of Semantic Technology, Common Lisp tools and Professional Services. Franz Inc. recently introduced Allegro SET, the industry’s first Semantic Entity Tracker, a leading-edge development platform to build flexible and scalable semantic applications quickly and cost-effectively.

Franz’s graph database, AllegroGraph®, has been an industry leader for several years and provides a scalable storage layer for powerful Complex Event Processing applications that incorporate GeoTemporal Reasoning, Social Network Analytics and Ontology Modeling capabilities and operates as the core of Allegro SET.

Franz’s Professional Service team is in the business of helping companies turn Data into Information and Information into Knowledge. We combine Data, Business Intelligence, and Analytics consulting services under one roof for our customers.

Franz Inc., an American owned company based in Oakland, California, is committed to market-driven product development, the highest levels of product quality and responsive customer support and service. Franz customers include Fortune 500 companies in the government, life sciences and telecommunications industries. Franz has demonstrated consistent growth and profitability since inception. For more information, visit http://www.franz.com.