As Published In November/December 2006

Oracle.com's new virtual press room makes Web 2.0 look quaint.

Oracle has deployed a radically new version of its virtual press room. Now this may not seem like particularly interesting news for Oracle Magazine readers in and of itself. But once you become aware of the technology running under the covers, I fully expect a change in your outlook.

Developed in conjunction with Siderean Software, the revamped press room runs on a Semantic Web engine integrated with Oracle Database. For those unfamiliar with the term, the Semantic Web, to describe it simplistically, is an information processing model in which computers—via a set of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) data modeling specifications called Resource Description Framework (RDF) and other technologies—can parse deep relationships between data that otherwise would need to be explicitly created by humans. For example, in the un-Semantic Web, a computer has no intuitive understanding that Larry Ellison is the founder and CEO of Oracle, only that Larry, Ellison, Oracle, CEO, and founder may all be present in a given document. (This limited understanding, of course, is the basis of traditional search and Web 2.0 architecture.) In contrast, in the Semantic Web, an information-gathering computer can deduce that relationship, making the information discovery experience much more intuitive for users. Think of it as interactive search: Any given keyword will lead you to new keywords you may never have considered in the context of the search at hand.

This concept is manifest in the new Oracle virtual press room, which permits you to make new connections through the data—you can navigate across content relationships whose existence you may otherwise not know about. In our virtual press room model, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search serves as the eyes and ears of the Seamark Navigator Semantic Web engine by crawling the available content and metadata, and the Oracle RDF Store (which is fully integrated with Oracle Database out of the box) serves as its memory by storing RDF data.

Explore the advanced virtual press room at oracle.com/corporate/pressroom.

Oracle TechCasts Still Loud and Clear

We're well past the first birthday of the Oracle TechCast podcast program: The first show, in which Oracle TopLink Product Manager Shaun Smith discussed Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0, was published May 17, 2005. Since then, as of this writing, TechCast shows have been downloaded or clicked more than 125,000 times. (There are some good AppCasts out there too, by the way.)

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With the help of a top-notch production team, we have accelerated the rate of publication in the last few months. This acceleration is a reflection of our continuing commitment to this format and of the interesting goings-on at Oracle in 2006—such as Oracle Secure Enterprise Search and its deployment across customer-facing Oracle Web sites, and new database options such as Oracle Database Vault and Oracle Content Database.

Clearly iTunes support for podcasting was a major success factor. We were lucky in that the Oracle TechCast program launched just before this support became available, and we managed to attract some media attention in the process. And unless I'm mistaken, Oracle was the first major company to publish podcasts from the floor of an event (Oracle OpenWorld 2005). So you could say that podcasting is in our DNA.

Subscribe to the Oracle TechCast RSS feed, or listen to TechCast MP3s in hosted mode, at oracle.com/techcasts.

Guide to Linux Command Mastery, Expert Edition

Oracle ACE Arup Nanda has followed up on Sheryl Calish's popular OTN article "Guide to Linux File Command Mastery" with a four-part series on the use of advanced Linux commands as well as of more-routine commands for purposes you may not have thought of. He has also included helpful Oracle-specific tips of particular interest to Oracle DBAs and sysadmins. You can find Nanda's "Guide to Advanced Linux Command Mastery" at oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/advanced-linux-commands/part1.html.