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

June 15, 2011 - PRLog -- An ever growing number of Web sites contain rich meta-data about the page contents, e.g. product prices and features in shopping sites, opening hour 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, or 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 meta-data from more than 260 million pages in its index, Sindice.com currently offers the world’s largest repository of continuously updated Web of Data content, and it’s 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. A long awaited feature for data oriented Web developers, this functionality allows third parties to  develop novel applications for desktop, mobile, browser, or browser hosted extensions that leverage structured data from a vast collection of Web sites in parallel, eliminating the need to crawl, extract, transform, cleanse, and load on a per Web application basis.

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 (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 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 Web site – 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 dataspaces. Sindice.com is also focusing on quite practical products set to immediately reward those who have and are investing in semantic markup already e.g. adopting GoodRelations for ecommerce pages, Opengraph or the new Schema.org.”, he adds.

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 the 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 has 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 use of Semantic technologies at InterWeb and Enterprise scales”, he explains. “Web-scale semantic dataspaces 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 dataspaces to enable a new wave of data intelligence in applications and within enterprises”

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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 (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 & 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.