The name change reflects the strong brand we’ve built up around our Cerebra product suite, said Vickie Farrell, vice president of marketing at the Carlsbad, California software firm.
Cerebra is focused on the development of semantic information architectures, based on a core inference engine that extrapolates accurate meaning from data stored across corporate databases and applications; for example, a supplier can be referred to as many things in different places. In other words the system stores the meaning of data as facts about objects.
Proponents argue that a semantic view mirrors real-world more closely and simplifies complex relationships better than traditional relational database systems. It also reduces storage size for large applications like data warehouses.
Cerebra’s software is closely aligned to the Web Ontology Language (OWL) standards, which is an enabling technology approved by the W3C for the semantic web which people like Tim Berners-Lee and others have been working on for some time.
Network Inference was originally a UK-company born out of research done at the University of Manchester into semantics. The company has since set up in the US and counts an impressive client list that includes organizations like Boeing, NATO, NASA, and Ordnance Survey.
Cerebra isn’t alone in pushing the development of semantic technologies. Companies like Israel-based Unicorn Solutions and US-based Contivo also offer semantic-based integration technologies.
