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Franz Tech Corner News

March, 2012

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In this issue

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Allegro CL 9.0 - Call for Beta Testers

Allegro CL 9.0 should be ready for Beta testing early April, 2012. The major new feature in Allegro CL 9.0 is Symmetric MultiProcessing (SMP). This allows separate Lisp threads to run on separate hardware processors, potentially significantly reducing execution time on multiprocessor machines. SMP is available on the Windows, Linux and Mac platforms. It is not available on FreeBSD and Solaris platforms. All platforms do have non-SMP versions of Allegro CL 9.0.beta. Common Graphics, the IDE, and CLIM are only available on the non-SMP versions of Allegro CL 9.0.

Users should be aware that programs which ran correctly in a non-SMP Lisp may produce incorrect results in an SMP Lisp unless issues like separate processes both modifying the value of the same variable are handled correctly. (Wrapping code with the without-interrupts macro protected variables from being modified by two processes at once in a non-SMP Lisp but this does not work in an SMP Lisp.) Although release 8.2 did not support SMP, operators designed to assist in SMP programming were implemented. This issue and the operators are discussed in the 8.2 version of smp.htm. That document (and its 9.0.beta update which will be available when 9.0.beta is released) is a good starting place for users interested in trying the SMP Lisp.

There are also numerous other enhancements in 9.0.beta. Users interested in becoming beta testers should contact sales@franz.com for more information.

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Webcast - Making Solr Search Smarter using RDF

Join us - Wednesday, March 28th at 10AM Pacific.

Solr has been widely adopted in the Enterprise because it offers powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, fuzzy search, stemming, ranking, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling and much more.

Despite Solr's many capabilities the product does not include the ability to perform semantic search in your files. For example, it does not let you perform queries or reasoning over the objects that are discovered in a document via Entity Extraction. For that you need to marry Solr with an RDF Database to create intelligent text documents. Several of our SemTech customer projects have found this augmentation of Solr with RDF to be a key feature for creating unique capabilities within their product offering.

In our webcast we'll show you some demos of applications that use Solr and an RDF Database to reason over text objects. We'll also provide a short tutorial on how to keep Solr in sync with the RDF Database.

Register for this webcast here.

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SRI and Vulcan's Lisp Based Aura Project - A Textbook with Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

As part of Project Halo, Vulcan Inc.'s staged, long-range research effort towards the development of a "Digital Aristotle", SRI has developed AURA to allow subject matter experts (SMEs), for example, biologists, physicists, and chemists, and scientific educators to formulate knowledge and questions to query that knowledge, with an ever-decreasing reliance on knowledge engineers. As part of this effort, SRI have developed "Inquire: A Textbook with Knowledge Representation and Reasoning".

For full details, see here

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5th European Lisp Symposium

April 30th to May 1st - Univ of Zadar, Croatia

The purpose of the European Lisp Symposium is to provide a forum for the discussion and dissemination of all aspects of design, implementation and application of any of the Lisp and Lisp-inspired dialects, including Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, AutoLisp, ISLISP, Dylan, Clojure, ACL2, ECMAScript, Racket, SKILL, and so on. We encourage everyone interested in Lisp to participate.

For additional information, see here.

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International Lisp Conference - 2012

Kyoto, Japan - Oct. 21-24

The Association of Lisp Users is pleased to announce the 2012 International Lisp Conference will be held in Kyoto, Japan at Miyakomesse from October 21st to 24th, 2012.

This year's program consists of tutorials at beginners' and advanced levels, prominent invited speakers from the Lisp communities, an excellent technical session, tours of Jidai-Matsuri: festival enjoyed by people of all ages, participating in its historical reenactment parade dressed in authentic costumes representing various periods, and characters in Japanese feudal history.

For additional information, see here

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Practical Semantic Web - Applications, Common Lisp Edition

This new book is intended to be a practical guide for using RDF data in information processing, linked data, and semantic web applications using both the AllegroGraph commercial product and the Sesame open source project.

For additional information and to purchase, see here.

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Training Schedule

BECOME ALLEGRO CERTIFIED - To obtain your Allegro CL Certification enroll in our LIVE Program which offers developers an opportunity to learn and improve their Lisp programming skills from the comfort of their home or office while interacting with the Franz instructor.

Lisp Programming Series Level I: Basic Lisp Essentials - April 10, 17, and 24

Lisp Programming Series Level II: Specialized Components of Lisp - May 8, 15, and 22

For additional information and to register, see here.

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