Data.world has been expanding its footprint in the enterprise. The acqui-hiring of Capsenta complements its portfolio with knowledge graph virtualization to connect data in the cloud and on premise, and a UI to build knowledge graphs

Data.world connects data and people. That was the gist of our coverage of data.world’s release of its enterprise platform about a year ago. Data.world has been doing that with great success, and today it’s bringing in Capsenta to take things to the next level.

In a nutshell, data.world uses the superpowers of Knowledge Graph (aka Linked Data, aka Semantic Web) technology to integrate datasets and provide a data management and collaboration platform for the enterprise. Capsenta has patented technology that helps integrate data sources (predominantly relational) and make them accessible as knowledge graphs, be it on premises or in the cloud.

The two companies have been working together for a while, and they match not just technologically, but also culturally. ZDNet discussed with data.world CEO and co-founder Brett Hurt, and Capsenta founder Juan Sequeda, who will be serving as Principal Scientist at data.world.

Hurt mentioned that the recent wave of acquisitions is a testament to the fact that data and analytics are becoming a core element for enterprises. He went on to add that data.world’s offering has been really popular with enterprises, including customers such as a Big Four professional services firm and a Top-10 American investment bank.

Some of these customers are in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare or finance, and sometimes this poses a challenge. Data.world runs a cloud service which can ingest and catalog data, metadata, or both. In regulated industries, moving data to the cloud may not be an option. This is where Capsenta’s Ultrawrap™ data integration software comes in.

Sequeda, who has been working on knowledge graph virtualization for over a decade, knows very well both the strengths and the weaknesses of this technology. Knowledge graphs, and the SPARQL query language, are ideal for data integration and cataloging scenarios. The problem, as Sequeda put it, is that in some ways SPARQL tried to reinvent the wheel:

“We have relational technology with over 30 years of accumulated experience, why not reuse this?”. So what Capsenta’s technology does is to act as a bridge between SPARQL and relational data sources. Queries are formulated in SPARQL, leveraging its ability to support many different data sources, then translated and executed in SQL, where those data sources are relational.

This way, data stored in relational databases on premises can stay where they are, while ingested metadata can be used to make it part of a knowledge graph spanning many data sources both on premise and in the cloud. Sequeda noted that Capsenta’s solution adds negligible overhead, effectively making the execution time of SPARQL in the cloud equal to that of SQL on premise.

As Hurt mentioned, data.world has been working with Capsenta for about a year and a half already. Initially Capsenta was a data.world partner, but the slew of enterprise customers meant that the use cases where Capsenta’s technology could be used proliferated. This, in turn, made joining forces the next step, and as both Hurt and Sequeda said, “it feels like we should have been working together all along”.

Read the full article on ZDNet