Semantic graph database underpins healthcare data lake

Franz Inc., in partnership with Montefiore Health System, is bringing the data lake to health IT using Franz's semantic graph database technology. Until its venture into the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries over the past few years, the 31-year-old Oakland, Calif., company had done business mainly in the worlds of national defense and intelligence, into which it sold its artificial intelligence-based triple store database that uses semantic, instead of relational, database technology. The system Franz has adapted for health IT, with partners such as Montefiore in the Bronx, N.Y., is based on AllegroGraph, one of its flagship products. Montefiore is using the system, called the Semantic Data Lake for Healthcare, to perform sophisticated predictive analytics in a quest to improve patient care and lower hospital costs. AllegroGraph uses the resource description framework (RDF) standard known as a "triple" to process and represent data semantically, and graph visualization software for visual discovery.