Web 3.0 Journal

First Application for Open Source Semantic Web Infrastructure Ushers in Era of Structured, Information-Rich Collaboration for the Enterprise

SAN FRANCISCO, March 17 /PRNewswire/ -- zAgile, Inc., the open source leader in information collaboration, today announced the general availability of Wikidsmart, the first application to leverage zAgile's semantic web infrastructure. Wikidsmart's groundbreaking semantic wiki features for Atlassian's Confluence enterprise wiki, enable users to: enter content in a consistent and contextually organized fashion; generate pages of inferred wiki content; automate wiki page and link maintenance; and easily find precise information with context-sensitive navigation and search. Information collaboration is the deep integration of information across teams, tools, and applications, with a common semantic web based infrastructure, enabling comprehensive organization-wide collaboration. The zAgile infrastructure provides a foundation for information integration with other applications in the enterprise.

Although wikis are extremely popular for collaboration, users struggle with organizing, maintaining, and finding content, as well as entering data in a consistent way that captures meaningful information. And users waste time maintaining links manually which often cause wrong or outdated information. These inefficiencies and inconsistencies create bottlenecks for users to collaborate quickly and easily. Wikidsmart removes these bottlenecks by enabling users to semantically capture content.

Content may be entered in a consistent fashion via semantically annotated forms. Annotation captures properties, behaviors, and relationships of content. Information may be retrieved by contextually navigating through topics or simple context-sensitive searches. Inferred content may be generated automatically with simple embedded queries.

Before Wikidsmart, no way existed to deeply integrate information across systems and expose the information within the wiki. Plug-ins attempt to integrate data silos but do not provide a comprehensive semantic foundation. And other semantic wikis are limited to content within the wiki itself.

zAgile's infrastructure, driven by ontologies that describe the artifacts, relationships, and behaviors for a domain, enables rich integration with other systems based on open semantic web standards. Extensible ontologies for the software engineering domain are included, and zAgile provides professional services for ontology development for other domains including CRM and ERP. Other ontologies from third party providers may be used as well.

Connectors are currently available for Jira, Subversion, and Perforce, and others will be added by zAgile and its open source community.

"zAgile seemed too good to be true, but they proved it to me. Before zAgile, we had the right tools, but we saw opportunities to gain more efficiency. ... now we are even more productive across engineering, professional services, and product management teams," says zAgile customer Niall Murphy, VP of Engineering at Market6.

Availability and Licensing

Wikidsmart is available for download at www.zagile.com and licensed under the open source AGPL v3. A hosted "sandbox" allows users to test-drive a sample Wikidsmart for Confluence via the web without installing products (and integration with Jira and Subversion will be hosted soon too). Annual technical support subscriptions for the open source product start at $US 1,200 for 25 users, and commercial license subscriptions with additional premium features are available upon request.

About zAgile, Inc.

Founded in 2006, zAgile, the open source leader in information collaboration, has corporate headquarters in San Francisco. Information collaboration is the deep integration of information across teams, tools, and applications, with a common semantic web based infrastructure, enabling comprehensive organization-wide collaboration. zAgile significantly reduces costs of collaboration on projects, instills consistency of methodologies across all projects, and instills confidence and predictability of delivery schedules. Partners include Atlassian, HP, Sun, WanDisco, and Red Hat/JBoss.

SOURCE zAgile, Inc.