Company History

In 2016, the Semantic Web Company is acknowledged as one of ‘100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management‘. A tribute to the company’s positioning as software vendor and sparring partner in research and knowledge transfer.

KMWorld lists PoolParty as one of the Trend-Setting Products of 2015. Global enterprises ranging from pharma and healthcare, finance, media and publishing to government organizations run already more than 100 PoolParty instances.

PoolParty 4.0 gets released. The product steadily transforms from a knowledge engineering tool into a full-blown semantic suite. The major release includes among many other features an extensive text-mining component and enables users to include Linked Data sources into their knowledge models.

The company announces a new strategic positioning. punkt.netServices and Semantic Web School merge into Semantic Web Company. PoolParty Semantic Suite is the core product of the company. Attending to research and community remain integral corporate activities to impact the technology market. PoolParty is now positioned at the top of semantic technology solutions.

The European research project LOD2 is kicked-off. The multidisciplinary project consortium consists of complementary semantic technology vendors, researchers and global enterprises including Semantic Web Company. The outcome of the research project gets globally acknowledged as an important contribution to the adoption of semantic technologies: The integration of graph databases and semantic software solutions is substantially improved. Additionally the performance in large scale RDF data transformation increases. Semantic Web Company recognizes the potential of diverse research consortia and establishes its own research department.

2009 marks a milestone in the corporate history: After two years of development work, the first version of PoolParty Semantic Suite is released. It indicates a strategic shift for the company: The core product ConX is deprecated. Since then, the company focuses on bringing semantic technologies to enterprises. Many companies had attended the Semantic Web School in previous years and raised questions how to implement this interesting technology approach. They now can be served with a standards-based taxonomy software solution. Sun Microsystems, Roche Diagnostics, Credit Suisse and Education Services of Australia are among the first customers.

In 2007 the W3C consortium establishes Semantic Web standards and the company follows their lead. The company shares the strong belief that standards are beneficial in an enterprise context. The company founders also belong to the W3C invited expert group. They are acknowledged for their contributions to make Semantic Web Standards and Linked Data Management a preferred data management approach in global organisations.

The company increasingly experiences the limitations of innovative and user-oriented knowledge management portals due to the nature of rigid databases. The demand for semantic networks – as it is called – is becoming obvious. Yet a wider awareness for a better data management approach is still in an early development stage. However, the idea to build PoolParty Semantic Suite is born.

In 2005, punkt.netServices founds the Semantic Web School and the conference series SEMANTiCS to build and educate a global community around semantic technologies.The interest in semantically enhanced applications begins, even before any technical standards and automatized workflows have been established. The Semantic Web School and SEMANTiCS start to showcase technical needs and theoretical approaches. Since then SEMANTiCS yearly takes place in alternating European cities.

punkt.netServices starts its service portfolio with building custom websites. The company acknowledges the need for a proprietary content management system and starts to develop ConX. The CMS market just starts to grow. punkt.netServices quickly becomes a trusted partner for complex web projects that go beyond content publishing. Knowledge portals including search and matching functionalities become the core business.