Cerebra, Inc.'s New Products Bring Metadata to Life; Cerebra Workbench(TM) and Cerebra Repository(TM) Products for Lifecycle Management of Active Metadata Already in Production with Customers.

CARLSBAD, Calif. -- Cerebra, Inc., the standards-native semantic technology company, today announced the launch of new products for managing "active" metadata, enabling enterprises to dynamically align producers and consumers of information, products and services based on business meaning.

Metadata defines the syntax and, increasingly, semantics of data elements. Active metadata uses meaning to dynamically classify information depending on context to make change and complexity manageable. Cerebra's new products, Cerebra Workbench and Cerebra Repository, are already in production at customer sites to manage complex product portfolios for financial reporting and portfolio pricing programs across multiple channels and business functions.

The new products help enterprises leverage existing skill sets and information resources to accelerate deployment and change cycles for business applications, leveraging the company's flagship run-time semantic query platform, Cerebra Server(TM).

"We're seeing more and more of our clients evolving toward data-centric organizations like the Information Center of Excellence," said Jill Dyche, partner and co-founder of Baseline Consulting, and faculty member of The Data Warehousing Institute. "The use of semantic technology for managing metadata could go a long way in maximizing the effectiveness of these new functions. The more the capability is packaged, the more it can help companies manage their information as a corporate asset. Cerebra is moving in the right direction with this release."

"With existing platforms, metadata is locked into proprietary stores in proprietary formats, and users must hunt down and interpret the metadata they need. Making use of metadata (for example for ETL and reporting) requires reinterpretation and recoding or forced consensus and homogeneity," said Matthew Quinlan, Director of Product Marketing. "The problem is that semantics -- the level at which information can really be aligned and integrated -- are not captured, stored and shared by traditional tools. Cerebra's new products bring knowledge capture to the business with a new deal: using our software, metadata can be shared, can evolve and can be used in different contexts across the enterprise to automate operations. Cerebra makes metadata active."

The new products, released as part of the Cerebra Suite version 4.1, are designed for the key business and technical owners of semantics in the enterprise. They provide a rich feature set for the management and integration of metadata.

Cerebra Repository is a collaborative, version and access-controlled store for managing and integrating semantically-rich metadata. It provides:

--Collaborative metadata lifecycle management

--Import/Export of vocabularies to/from external data sources

--Configuration of constraints to control quality and validity of data entry

--E-mail event notifications for workflow

--Non-proprietary, standard storage to prevent vendor lock-in 

--Synchronization of changes to external RDBMS/Operational Data Stores

--Security administration to control user access at a fine-grained level

--Plug-ins for configuration of event scheduling and searching

Cerebra Workbench provides a web-based UI for metadata lifecycle management by all users through:

--Management of modules and their contents (including terms, hierarchies, term and value relations, synonyms, meta-relations)

--Ability to link and combine modules and manage versions

--Security and event notification configuration

--Model querying which reflects explicit metadata and implicit implications

--Components available for embedding functionality in existing UIs and applying custom look-and-feel

The new products are now shipping.

About Cerebra

Cerebra is the leading provider of standards-based, enterprise-ready, semantic technologies. Cerebra enterprise solutions offer Global 2000 organizations short-term payback through lower maintenance costs and project risk, and new integration and application capabilities, while providing a standards-driven pragmatic roadmap towards the model-driven Adaptive Enterprise. Cerebra's products provide an enterprise-strength integration and business application environment on an SOA-ready platform based on the W3C's OWL, RDF, XML, SOAP and WSDL standards. Cerebra's corporate offices include Carlsbad and Menlo Park, Calif.; Boston; Washington, DC; and Manchester, England. For more information, visit http://www.cerebra.com