Ontoprise GmbH explained

ontoprise GmbH
Founder:	Jürgen Angele, Stefan Decker, Hans-Peter Schnurr, Steffen Staab, Rudi Studer
Location City:	Karlsruhe
Location Country:	Germany
Num Employees:	48 (2009)

Ontoprise GmbH was a provider of Semantic Web infrastructure technologies and products used to support dynamic semantic information integration and information management processes at the enterprise level. Its primary place of business was located in Karlsruhe, Germany.

History

The company was founded in 1999 by Prof. Dr. Juergen Angele, Prof. Dr. Stefan Decker, Prof. Dr. Rudi Studer, Prof. Dr. Steffen Staab, and Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Ing. Hans-Peter Schnurr is a spin-off from Karlsruhe University (Germany) to commercialize newly developed technologies on ontology reasoning. In 2012 Ontoprise had to file for bankruptcy, see below.^[1] On July 6, 2012, Darmstadt-based semafora systems GmbH (with financial backing from Triangle Venture Capital Group) acquired for an undisclosed purchase price the majority of products and business areas from Ontoprise, namely SemanticXpress, SemanticGuide, SemanticMiner, OntoBroker, OntoStudio, SemanticIntegrator, and SemanticContentAnalytics.^[2] As a consequence, nearly all Ontoprise employees left the company. Commercial support for SMW+ is now offered by DIQA, a start-up founded by former Ontoprise employees.^[3]

Product portfolio

• OntoStudio (formerly OntoEdit): modeling environment to create and maintain ontologies.
• OntoBroker: fast Semantic Web-Middleware for inferencing and managing ontologies. It supports the W3C Semantic Web recommendations: OWL, RDF, RDFS, SPARQL, RIF, and ObjectLogic (the successor of F-logic).
• SemanticMiner: ontology-based enterprise search.
• SemanticMiner for SharePoint: Microsoft SharePoint Server ontology search extension
• SemanticGuide: an expert system for field service
• SMW+: semantic enterprise wiki for professional users

Research

• ONTORULE

Further reading

• Use Case: How Ontologies and Rules Help to Advance Automobile Development "W3C Semantic Web Use Cases and Case Studies". June 2008.
• On The Cusp: A Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry. A Global Review of the Industry and Leading Vendors. David Provost. September 2008.

Notes and References

1. Web site: Ontoprise stellt Insolvenzantrag . Ontoprise starts insolvency proceedings . German . 3 May 2012 . econo . 30 July 2012 . https://web.archive.org/web/20120712233517/http://www.econo.de/no_cache/nachrichten/einzelansicht/article/ontoprise-stellt-insolvenzantrag.html . 12 July 2012 . dead .
2. Web site: semafora takes over Ontoprise GmbH business units . 6 July 2012 . semafora . 30 July 2012.
3. Web site: Michael Erdmann . SMW+ is dead, long live SMW+ . MediaWiki users mailing list . 25 July 2012 . 30 July 2012.