Oracle tackles the context conundrum

The trouble with keeping data in a standard relational database is that such information does not typically come with machine-readable descriptions of what the data is. Searching through an Air Force database will not provide any indication that what you are looking at is an Air Force database.

As long as the database is used by its intended audience, this lack of database self-awareness is not a problem. But when another system needs to access the data, how will it make sense of the columns and rows of data? It is this semantic cluelessness that slows the process of gathering intelligence from the data.

At least one commercial database vendor is addressing this problem. Oracle is using two Semantic Web tools for the job: the Resource Definition Framework (RDF), support for which was added in Oracle 10g, and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), added in Oracle 11g.

RDF is the starting point.

“By storing RDF and applying rules to it, you can infer new information” and render explicit context about the data, said Xavier Lopez, director of spatial and semantic technologies at Oracle.

RDF offers the ability to link two data elements along with a term that describes the relationship between the two. The resulting three terms are called a triple. For instance, the database can ingest this statement: Lopez works at Oracle. “Lopez” would be the subject, “Oracle” the object and “works at” the predicate tying together the two, according to the description of RDF from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the framework (GCN.com, Quickfind 960).

But that’s just the start. Having these relationships in machine-readable language allows further reasoning about the data — making it machine-readable by other systems.

“Once you have triples in the database, you can start doing things you couldn’t do before,” Lopez said. “It is essentially designed to find patterns. Previously, it was available everywhere, but you couldn’t find patterns. Now you can find patterns across it.”

Unlike the traditional data cubes used in data mining applications, the schema of the data does not need to be established beforehand, making ad hoc queries a lot easier to execute.

Lopez has seen customers compile billions of triples. After enough data has been rendered into this format, additional inferences can be made.

For instance, if you have “Xavier works at Oracle” and “Oracle is a software company” then an inference could be that Xavier works for a software company.

This is a simple example, but a logical step-by-step process can generate new information.

And this is where OWL comes in.

OWL extends the range of inferencing that can be done on a dataset, Lopez said. Another W3C standard (GCN.com Quickfind 961), OWL is a “richer rule base,” he said. It offers sets of hierarchies that allow data to be described in terms of property characteristics, equalities and inequalities, data types, and restrictions on how the data can be defined.

Oracle has tools that can render standard relational data into the RDF format. And many software tools exist that parse unstructured data from Web sites, e-mail messages, blog sites and any other text-based documents into the RDF format.

Author: Joab Jackson @ www.gcn.com

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Oracle updates its Identity Manager tool

Oracle has released a new addition of its Identity Manager, version 9.1, adding new features to increase an organisation’s ability to comply with regulation and reduce the time it takes to complete an audit.

Hasan Rizvi, Oracle Identity Management and Security Products vice president, said “With this release, organisations can more rapidly experience the benefits identity provisioning delivers across their diverse IT environments.”

A new Graphical Workflow Designer is included in the release, designed to simplify the creation or workflows and help maintain their provisioning, while updates to Connector Wizards will help ease the creation of new connectors and streamline integration.

Nineteen new compliance and operational report templates will allow an organisation to increase its ability to streamline audit processes, while enhanced attestation capabilities will allow access privileges to be automated. The attestation process includes the reviewers, the data to be attested to, and the schedule for attestation activities.

Oracle’s identity management solution provides employees with one single identity for authentication across an enterprise’s many different registration systems.

The “HR-Driven Identity” solution was created by Oracle through combining two areas of its business; its Human Capital Management (HCM) application, which manages all the people aspects in human resources or payroll, and its technology Access Management system.

According to the firm the new technology was a response to regulation, such as Sarbanes-Oxley 2002, which has put increasing external pressure on businesses to show good governance and produce categorical reports on which employees have access to each system.

Individuals holding different identities within an organisation creates a considerable business risk and management overhead for employers. If identities can be consolidated, automated and tied to the initial identity provided to individuals by human resources, organisations will reduce costs, improve efficiencies and defraud its environment, it said.

Author: Rosalie Marshall @ www.itweek.co.uk

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Swedish Medical implements Oracle suite to support EMR system

Oracle has announced that Swedish Medical Center, a healthcare provider, has deployed components of the Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite - Oracle Universal Content Management and Oracle Imaging and Process Management - to deliver a content-enabled electronic medical record system that helps ensure patient information is available when and where a provider needs it.

Oracle enterprise content management software also facilitated Swedish Medical Center's electronic medical record (EMR) training initiative, helping the organization ensure an on-time rollout. Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite is a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

The new EMR system is accelerating the creation and management of patient records. One clinic, for example, had a basic patient records management system that required approximately 12 steps to pull information from faxes, attribute it to a specific patient and incorporate the data into the patient's record.

Swedish Medical Center's new EMR system uses Oracle Imaging and Process Management to complete this task in only four steps, freeing staff to focus on other responsibilities. Swedish Medical Center also slashed the time that it took to assemble training materials for new and existing processes from 24 hours to as little as 4 hours for major productions, and even less time for individual manual productions.

Source: www.cbronline.com

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