[ANNOUNCE ] Apache Rya - the newest Top-Level Project at ASF

[Adina Crainiceanu <ad...@usna.edu>]

[this announcement is available online at https://s.apache.org/0xc4g ]

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® Rya™ as a Top-Level Project

Scalable Open Source Big Data database processes queries in milliseconds;
used in autonomous drones, federated situation-aware access control
systems, and petabyte-scale graphs modeling, among many other applications.

Wakefield, MA —24 September 2019— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the
all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open
Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® Rya™ as a
Top-Level Project (TLP).

Apache Rya (pronounced "ree-uh") is a Cloud-based Big Data triple store
(subject-predicate-object) database used to process queries in
milliseconds. The project was originally developed at the Laboratory for
Telecommunication Sciences, and was submitted to the Apache Incubator in
September 2015.

"We are very excited to reach this important milestone showing the maturity
of the project and of the community around it," said Dr. Adina Crainiceanu,
Vice President of Apache Rya and Associate Professor of Computer Science at
the U.S. Naval Academy. "RDF (Resource Description Framework) triple data
format is simple and flexible, making it easy to express diverse datasets
such as connections between users on social media, financial data and
transactions, medical data, and many others. Rya provides a scalable
solution to store and query such data. The publication of the first
research article about Rya garnered interest from industry, academia, and
several government agencies. Bringing the project to ASF allowed
collaboration and increased pace of development."

With its ability to store billions of linked information sets and return
answers to most computer-based questions in under a second, Rya's scalable
RDF data management system is built on top of Apache Accumulo® to support
SPARQL queries for RDF data. A MongoDB back-end is also implemented. Rya
uses novel storage methods, indexing schemes, and query processing
techniques that scale to billions of triples across multiple nodes.

Rya is in use at organizations such as Enlighten IT Consulting, Modus
Operandi, Parsons Corporation, Semantic Arts, Semantic Web Company, Sierra
Nevada Corporation, and U.S. Department of Defense agencies. Apache Rya is
recognized as one of the most advanced database projects in the United
States Department of the Navy, powering a new generation of drones,
advanced tactical communications through manned-unmanned teaming, and
supporting autonomous swarms of smaller robots, among numerous other
applications. In addition, Apache Rya is being used for artificial
intelligence projects involving semi-autonomous content production
operations.

"I would like to thank our mentors for their guidance and recognize the
Apache Rya founders for making their project available for all to use and
further extend," said Jennifer Brown, Project Manager for Semantic
Technologies at Parsons Corporation, and member of the Apache Rya Project
Management Committee. "In 2012 the founders introduced an RDF store backed
by Apache Accumulo that was capable of basic inferencing, scaling to
billions of triples, and providing millisecond query times. Our Semantic
Technologies team at Parsons Corporation has enjoyed the opportunity to
collaborate with the Apache Rya community to contribute new indexing
strategies, query planner optimizations, additional inference capabilities,
alerting extensions, native support for popular graph processing
frameworks, and more."

"It's great to see Apache Rya has matured into a Top-Level Project. Rya is
a very innovative and Open Source RDF data management system based on Big
Data technology," said Dr. Zhiyuan Chen, Associate Professor, Information
Systems Department, University of Maryland Baltimore County. "We have used
Apache Rya in a variety of research projects ranging from more efficient
query processing techniques over geographically distributed RDF data to
situation-aware access control in federated systems. We found Rya very easy
to use, easy to extend, and extremely efficient."

"Apache Rya has the potential to become one of the most scalable RDF data
management systems on the market," said Andreas Blumauer, Founder and CEO,
Semantic Web Company GmbH and Director, PoolParty Software Ltd.

"Our technology helps organizations discover the rare and hidden patterns
with applied semantics enhancements and AI/ML analytics, to develop Living
Intelligence in a data domain," said Kim Ziehlke, Principal Software
Engineer at Modus Operandi. "Patterns are used to predict potential
opportunities and threats and as a result, our clients can take
preventative action, or take leading-edge advantage in complex decisions.
Modus Operandi has achieved 2+ BILLION triples, sub-second queries,
thousands of unstructured docs processed per second all backed by the
Apache Rya triple store."

"Apache Rya is a foundational piece of technology on our projects," said
Roshan Punnose, Technical Director at Enlighten IT Consulting and member of
the Apache Rya Project Management Committee. "We use Rya to model graphs
and entities at petabyte scale. It is the only technology that we have
found to scale this type of information with field level visibilities,
which allow data protections required on our projects. We have worked with
Rya for 7 years and have benefitted from the work the Apache Rya team has
done to help increase performance. We would like to thank all the
contributors for their diligence and hard work in making Rya a first class
citizen of the Apache community."

"Apache Rya is a very exciting project at The Apache Software Foundation
that combines the world of 'Semantic Data' with that of 'Big Data'," said
Christopher Tubbs, ASF Member and Project Management Committee (PMC) member
of Apache Accumulo and Apache Fluo. "Implementing anything at scale can
pose a challenge, but making semantic data searchable using familiar
standards, such as SPARQL, and optimizing it at scale is really quite an
amazing feat. Yet, that's precisely what the Rya community has done.
Building on highly scalable platforms such as Apache Accumulo, the Rya
community has produced an impressive platform for storing and querying very
large semantic data sets. Apache Rya is something that every data scientist
should get to know, because it's pretty cool."

"Apache Rya is an amazing project that enables users to execute SPARQL
against large RDF data sets," said Keith Turner, Principal Software
Engineer at Peterson Technologies, Vice President of Apache Fluo, member of
the Apache Accumulo Project Management Committee, and ASF Member. "I had
the pleasure to work with the Rya community when they asked for advice on
using Apache Fluo for pre-computed joins. During our discussions, I found
the folks working on Rya didn't need much assistance because they already
had a thorough understanding of the complex issues surrounding distributed
consistency. When considering using a piece of software that solves a hard
problem for you, it’s comforting to know great minds stand behind it. With
great software and wonderful community, what are you waiting for? Give Rya
a try. Also, as an extra bonus Rya is an Apache community and all are
welcome to participate in shaping the future of Rya."

"We are grateful for the mentorship provided by the Apache Incubator in
building a diverse and open community and learning the Apache Way," added
Crainiceanu. "We are looking forward to continuing our journey as a
Top-Level Project."

Availability and Oversight
Apache Rya software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is
overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A
Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day
operations, including community development and product releases. For
downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Rya,
visit http://rya.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/apacherya

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing
to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code
donations from external organizations and existing external projects enter
the ASF through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance
with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to
our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted
projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure,
communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner
consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is
not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code,
it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF.
For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350
leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's
most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process
known as "The Apache Way," more than 760 individual Members and 7,300
Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely
available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users
worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache
License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists,
mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user
conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable
organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors
including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Anonymous, ARM, Baidu, Bloomberg,
Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google,
Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Inspur, Leaseweb, Microsoft, ODPi,
Pineapple Fund, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, Tencent,
Union Investment, Workday, and Verizon Media. For more information, visit
http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Accumulo", "Apache Accumulo",
"Fluo", "Apache Fluo","Rya", "Apache Rya", and "ApacheCon" are registered
trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United
States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the
property of their respective owners.

# # #

Re: [ANNOUNCE ] Apache Rya - the newest Top-Level Project at ASF

[Josh Elser <el...@apache.org>]

Let me send a heart-felt congratulations to the community. Moving a 
software project through the ASF Incubator is no small feat.

You should all be extremely proud of what you have accomplished here, 
and remain ever-focused on growing and expanding the Rya community.

Well done. Go celebrate :)

On 9/24/19 11:21 AM, Adina Crainiceanu wrote:
> [this announcement is available online at https://s.apache.org/0xc4g ]
> 
> The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® Rya™ as a Top-Level Project
> 
> Scalable Open Source Big Data database processes queries in milliseconds;
> used in autonomous drones, federated situation-aware access control
> systems, and petabyte-scale graphs modeling, among many other applications.
> 
> Wakefield, MA —24 September 2019— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the
> all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open
> Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® Rya™ as a
> Top-Level Project (TLP).
> 
> Apache Rya (pronounced "ree-uh") is a Cloud-based Big Data triple store
> (subject-predicate-object) database used to process queries in
> milliseconds. The project was originally developed at the Laboratory for
> Telecommunication Sciences, and was submitted to the Apache Incubator in
> September 2015.
> 
> "We are very excited to reach this important milestone showing the maturity
> of the project and of the community around it," said Dr. Adina Crainiceanu,
> Vice President of Apache Rya and Associate Professor of Computer Science at
> the U.S. Naval Academy. "RDF (Resource Description Framework) triple data
> format is simple and flexible, making it easy to express diverse datasets
> such as connections between users on social media, financial data and
> transactions, medical data, and many others. Rya provides a scalable
> solution to store and query such data. The publication of the first
> research article about Rya garnered interest from industry, academia, and
> several government agencies. Bringing the project to ASF allowed
> collaboration and increased pace of development."
> 
> With its ability to store billions of linked information sets and return
> answers to most computer-based questions in under a second, Rya's scalable
> RDF data management system is built on top of Apache Accumulo® to support
> SPARQL queries for RDF data. A MongoDB back-end is also implemented. Rya
> uses novel storage methods, indexing schemes, and query processing
> techniques that scale to billions of triples across multiple nodes.
> 
> Rya is in use at organizations such as Enlighten IT Consulting, Modus
> Operandi, Parsons Corporation, Semantic Arts, Semantic Web Company, Sierra
> Nevada Corporation, and U.S. Department of Defense agencies. Apache Rya is
> recognized as one of the most advanced database projects in the United
> States Department of the Navy, powering a new generation of drones,
> advanced tactical communications through manned-unmanned teaming, and
> supporting autonomous swarms of smaller robots, among numerous other
> applications. In addition, Apache Rya is being used for artificial
> intelligence projects involving semi-autonomous content production
> operations.
> 
> "I would like to thank our mentors for their guidance and recognize the
> Apache Rya founders for making their project available for all to use and
> further extend," said Jennifer Brown, Project Manager for Semantic
> Technologies at Parsons Corporation, and member of the Apache Rya Project
> Management Committee. "In 2012 the founders introduced an RDF store backed
> by Apache Accumulo that was capable of basic inferencing, scaling to
> billions of triples, and providing millisecond query times. Our Semantic
> Technologies team at Parsons Corporation has enjoyed the opportunity to
> collaborate with the Apache Rya community to contribute new indexing
> strategies, query planner optimizations, additional inference capabilities,
> alerting extensions, native support for popular graph processing
> frameworks, and more."
> 
> "It's great to see Apache Rya has matured into a Top-Level Project. Rya is
> a very innovative and Open Source RDF data management system based on Big
> Data technology," said Dr. Zhiyuan Chen, Associate Professor, Information
> Systems Department, University of Maryland Baltimore County. "We have used
> Apache Rya in a variety of research projects ranging from more efficient
> query processing techniques over geographically distributed RDF data to
> situation-aware access control in federated systems. We found Rya very easy
> to use, easy to extend, and extremely efficient."
> 
> "Apache Rya has the potential to become one of the most scalable RDF data
> management systems on the market," said Andreas Blumauer, Founder and CEO,
> Semantic Web Company GmbH and Director, PoolParty Software Ltd.
> 
> "Our technology helps organizations discover the rare and hidden patterns
> with applied semantics enhancements and AI/ML analytics, to develop Living
> Intelligence in a data domain," said Kim Ziehlke, Principal Software
> Engineer at Modus Operandi. "Patterns are used to predict potential
> opportunities and threats and as a result, our clients can take
> preventative action, or take leading-edge advantage in complex decisions.
> Modus Operandi has achieved 2+ BILLION triples, sub-second queries,
> thousands of unstructured docs processed per second all backed by the
> Apache Rya triple store."
> 
> "Apache Rya is a foundational piece of technology on our projects," said
> Roshan Punnose, Technical Director at Enlighten IT Consulting and member of
> the Apache Rya Project Management Committee. "We use Rya to model graphs
> and entities at petabyte scale. It is the only technology that we have
> found to scale this type of information with field level visibilities,
> which allow data protections required on our projects. We have worked with
> Rya for 7 years and have benefitted from the work the Apache Rya team has
> done to help increase performance. We would like to thank all the
> contributors for their diligence and hard work in making Rya a first class
> citizen of the Apache community."
> 
> "Apache Rya is a very exciting project at The Apache Software Foundation
> that combines the world of 'Semantic Data' with that of 'Big Data'," said
> Christopher Tubbs, ASF Member and Project Management Committee (PMC) member
> of Apache Accumulo and Apache Fluo. "Implementing anything at scale can
> pose a challenge, but making semantic data searchable using familiar
> standards, such as SPARQL, and optimizing it at scale is really quite an
> amazing feat. Yet, that's precisely what the Rya community has done.
> Building on highly scalable platforms such as Apache Accumulo, the Rya
> community has produced an impressive platform for storing and querying very
> large semantic data sets. Apache Rya is something that every data scientist
> should get to know, because it's pretty cool."
> 
> "Apache Rya is an amazing project that enables users to execute SPARQL
> against large RDF data sets," said Keith Turner, Principal Software
> Engineer at Peterson Technologies, Vice President of Apache Fluo, member of
> the Apache Accumulo Project Management Committee, and ASF Member. "I had
> the pleasure to work with the Rya community when they asked for advice on
> using Apache Fluo for pre-computed joins. During our discussions, I found
> the folks working on Rya didn't need much assistance because they already
> had a thorough understanding of the complex issues surrounding distributed
> consistency. When considering using a piece of software that solves a hard
> problem for you, it’s comforting to know great minds stand behind it. With
> great software and wonderful community, what are you waiting for? Give Rya
> a try. Also, as an extra bonus Rya is an Apache community and all are
> welcome to participate in shaping the future of Rya."
> 
> "We are grateful for the mentorship provided by the Apache Incubator in
> building a diverse and open community and learning the Apache Way," added
> Crainiceanu. "We are looking forward to continuing our journey as a
> Top-Level Project."
> 
> Availability and Oversight
> Apache Rya software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is
> overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A
> Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day
> operations, including community development and product releases. For
> downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Rya,
> visit http://rya.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/apacherya
> 
> About the Apache Incubator
> The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing
> to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code
> donations from external organizations and existing external projects enter
> the ASF through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance
> with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to
> our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted
> projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure,
> communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner
> consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is
> not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code,
> it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF.
> For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/
> 
> About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
> Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350
> leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's
> most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process
> known as "The Apache Way," more than 760 individual Members and 7,300
> Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely
> available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users
> worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache
> License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists,
> mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user
> conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable
> organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors
> including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Anonymous, ARM, Baidu, Bloomberg,
> Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google,
> Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Inspur, Leaseweb, Microsoft, ODPi,
> Pineapple Fund, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, Tencent,
> Union Investment, Workday, and Verizon Media. For more information, visit
> http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF
> 
> © The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Accumulo", "Apache Accumulo",
> "Fluo", "Apache Fluo","Rya", "Apache Rya", and "ApacheCon" are registered
> trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United
> States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the
> property of their respective owners.
> 
> # # #
>