A Note from TopQuadrant’s CEO, Irene Polikoff
This is the week of the Thanksgiving Holiday in the United States – a traditional “kick off” of the holiday season and a time for reflection, both, personal and professional. It is an understatement to call 2020 an unusual year. For many, this Thanksgiving and the quickly approaching Christmas will not be a typical holiday season. This is true for TopQuadrant, and we recognize that it is true for our customers. We hope that you have all found creative ways of working remotely as we continue to do. For TopQuadrant, this includes that for the first time our annual holiday party will be entirely virtual across different time zones.
As unfamiliar as this holiday period is, we feel there is much to celebrate and be thankful for. We have seen our customer base grow significantly this year. Without a doubt, this reflects a strong recognition of the importance of the information governance and the unique advantages of TopQuadrant’s technology.
TopQuadrant has always been a distributed company. Working remotely is nothing new for us. Well before 2020, we started to offer remote training and consulting as a more flexible way to support customers. Since spring, all TopBraid EDG product trainings have been delivered remotely and we have invested in re-organizing the training program to better support this mode of learning.
Another way we are giving our customers more flexibility is through our new SaaS option. There is growing customer interest in having TopQuadrant host the TopBraid EDG solution. Our SaaS offering is proving to have immediate benefits in accelerating the adoption and use of our solutions.
I want to conclude by thanking our new and our long-term customers. We look forward to working closely with you now and in the upcoming year.
Open Data Portals and Catalogs Blog Series
Several organizations, in both Europe and the United States, have expressed interest in creating a catalog of datasets similar to the EU Open Data Portal. In response, we have started a series that will demonstrate how TopBraid EDG can deliver a similar portal, out of the box.
In our first blog post, we explore the EU Open Data Portal, its capabilities and use of RDF technologies, specifically DCAT vocabulary.
Excerpt: First, let’s take a look at the EU Open Data Portal. It lets us search for datasets by entering search terms of interest e.g., population. We can then further narrow the list of datasets by using various facets such as Themes, Publishers, Country for which data is included in a dataset and Language of a dataset. If we click on a dataset of interest, we see more information, including the download links.
These features are available in TopBraid EDG out of the box and in the next blogs we will demonstrate them using datasets from the EU Open Data Portal. In this blog, we drill down on how the portal uses DCAT.
For the complete blog see: Exploring EU Open Data Portal
In our second blog post, we show datasets from the EU Open Data Portal in a searchable interactive catalog in TopBraid EDG.
Excerpt: The steps involved in creating this catalog in TopBraid EDG are:
- Establish an ontology in EDG that describes your datasets
- Define any control vocabularies you will use in describing datasets
- Upload or create data
With this done, your users can use Search the EDG to search and browse the datasets. For our example, we used several datasets that we downloaded in RDF from the EU portal and uploaded into EDG using its Import RDF functionality.
For the complete blog see: EU Open Data in TopBraid EDG
In the next blog, we will explore pre-built dataset models in TopBraid EDG, discuss why you may want to base your catalog on the EDG data assets ontology and demonstrate simple transformation from DCAT to EDG models.
New Customers, Media Mentions and Speaking Updates!
New Customers
A major bank holding company specializing in credit cards, auto loans, banking, and savings accounts selected TopBraid EDG — Vocabulary Management and TopBraid Explorer to support their Enterprise Data Management initiative. The main goal of this financial firm is to improve metadata quality by creating relationships and connections between objects in the firm’s ecosystem, thereby improving discoverability, analysis, and the enforcement of Data Management controls.
A technology company focused on AI-driven Data Discovery and Classification Enabling selected TopBraid EDG — Vocabulary Management to help manage its data protection and security taxonomies.
A large US-based medical center selected TopBraid EDG — Vocabulary Management to integrate different medical terminologies.
A German multinational engineering and technology company selected TopBraid EDG — Vocabulary Management and Business Glossary packages to establish a coherent semantic term management in a form of an Enterprise Business Glossary. They plan to interface it with the enterprise data catalog, to sustain a consistent business tagging of data assets. They also plan to interface it with CASE tools, to support reuse of business semantics in the enterprise architecture modeling processes.
Media Mentions
insideBIGDATA article: November 3, 2020, 2021 Trends in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: The ModelOps Movement. In this article, read what the experts, including Ralph Hodgson, CTO at TopQuadrant, predict will be the 2021 trends in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
TDAN article: October 21, 2020, Knowledge Graphs vs Property Graphs – Part III. This is part 3 of a 3-part series. In the last article, TopQuadrant CEO, Irene Polikoff, completes this TDAN article series by discussing some important topics beyond the critical differentiators in the terminology and capabilities of Property Graphs and Knowledge Graphs covered in Parts I and II.
Speaking Updates
SNOMED CT Expo 2020, Virtual Conference, October 8-9, 2020. TopQuadrant’s CTO, Ralph Hodgson, delivered a presentation on SNOMED-CT-SHAPES: A Simpler Approach to Working with SNOMED in RDF.
UPCOMING AND RECENT WEBINARS
UPCOMING: December 10, 2020 at 11:30 EST:
Automating the Mapping of Data Elements to Business Terms. In this webinar, we will describe how TopBraid EDG can help you automate this process by using Data Element Names to Map to Business Terms and Data to Map to Business Terms.
RECORDED:
Knowledge Graphs vs. Property Graphs — A Brief Overview and Comparison. This webinar will discuss these two types of graph data models, the strengths and limitations of each and why knowledge graphs are a strong foundation for enterprise data governance and metadata management.
RECORDED:
What is New in TopBraid EDG 6.4? This webinar explores enhancements and new features in the recent 6.4 release.
RECORDED:
How can Data Cataloging Integrate Key Viewpoints using Knowledge Graphs? This webinar explores why connecting different aspects and artifacts describing enterprise data sources is important for data governance, and how doing this helps in delivering integrated business and technical viewpoints.
UPDATED TOPBRAID VIDEOS
Our Quick Grok video series continues to be quite popular. The videos provide short, practical “how to” demos of EDG capabilities including specific features from each of the EDG packages.
A few of the more than 30 recently added or updated videos to highlight are:
Assets and Asset Collections in TopBraid EDG: This video provides a high-level overview of TopBraid EDG meta-model. It reviews assets and asset types in TopBraid EDG and how they are organized into different types of asset collections.
Data Cataloging in TopBraid EDG: This video shows how TopBraid EDG can catalog your organization’s data sources. Cataloging will capture all technical metadata and perform data profiling. TopBraid EDG will also, if desired, capture data samples that can provide governance teams insights into data and improve automated processes for linking technical and business metadata.
Governance Areas as Part of the Governance Model in TopBraid EDG: This video shows how to set up a governance model in TopBraid EDG by defining governance areas and associated asset collections. It also discusses how TopBraid EDG can support centralized, decentralized, and federated approaches to information governance.
Winter 2021
COMING UP:
TopQuadrant will host a webinar on building Open Data Catalogs and Portals on January 14, 2020 at 2:00 PM ET. As the date gets closer, we will be sending out details on how to join. Stay tuned…
NEXT ISSUE:
Our next newsletter will take a close look at the forthcoming TopBraid EDG 7.0. We project the Beta Release of 7.0 to be available in January, 2021.
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