MarkLogic Powers Premier Student Learning and Social Networking Platform

SAN CARLOS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Studying for the serious, not-so-serious, social, and anti-social student who is headed back to school this fall just got a whole lot easier. MarkLogic^® Corporation, the company revolutionizing the way organizations leverage unstructured information, announced today that its database is powering Xplana™, the world’s premier student-focused learning and social networking platform. With Xplana, a division of MBS Service Company, students can now get instant, searchable, and well-organized access to hundreds of thousands of academic resources. At the same time, they can interact, share, and collaborate with each other – all online and outside the print and digital book.

“The Xplana and MarkLogic development teams have been working together since March 2010 so the website would be ready in time for the start of school”

“Together, Xplana and MarkLogic have created a super-fast, flexible, one-stop web portal where students can take care of their immense ‘out of the classroom’ studying and social networking needs,” said Rob Reynolds, director of product design and research, Xplana. “We chose MarkLogic because we needed a trustworthy, advanced technology that could drive our intense information management requirements, as well as scale easily for millions of users. We were also attracted by their out-of-the-box feature modules that will continue to support our product vision.”

Xplana is using MarkLogic to manage and deliver all content and information that flows through the platform. This includes Xplana’s information schema, content metadata, user contributed information, and tagging. MarkLogic's advanced capabilities also powers the Xplana search engine and creates an intelligent connection to unlimited volumes of disparate, unstructured pieces of academic-related information, tools, and popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

“The Xplana and MarkLogic development teams have been working together since March 2010 so the website would be ready in time for the start of school,” said Tracy Eiler, vice president of marketing, MarkLogic. ”The close-knit working relationship between the companies’ developers drove a development cycle that allowed them to launch Xplana for students right on time, as promised. We are pleased that MarkLogic is having a direct impact on the growth of the Xplana user base with our ability to deliver content efficiently and with great flexibility.”

The MarkLogic database is storing all content, including text, thumbnails, images, user interaction, comments, and ratings, among other items. It is stored within the database and powers all search engine functionality for learning and academic needs. As an added benefit on the social context side, students are able to determine if their uploaded content is public or private. If it is public, it can be treated as read-only, or copied and edited by other users – it’s up to the student.

To learn more about Xplana, visit an introductory video narrated by Xplana’s Rob Reynolds at http://info.xplana.com/media/.

About MarkLogic

MarkLogic is revolutionizing the way organizations leverage information. The company’s flagship product is a purpose-built database for unstructured information. Customers in industries including media, government and financial services use MarkLogic to develop and deploy information applications at a fraction of the time and cost as compared to conventional technologies such as relational databases and search engines.

MarkLogic is headquartered in Silicon Valley with field offices in Austin, Boston, Frankfurt, London, New York, and Washington DC. The company is privately held with investors Sequoia Capital and Tenaya Capital. For more information, to download a trial version, or to read the award-winning Kellblog, written by MarkLogic CEO Dave Kellogg, go to www.marklogic.com.

About Xplana

Xplana is an online social learning platform that connects learners to content and communities. The platform is free to students and features an open, modular architecture that provides an organized learning context for useful learning content and tools scattered about the Web. It simplifies the learning process by connecting students’ informal learning outside of the classroom with the formal platforms and structures of schools and institutions. Additionally, Xplana serves as an access and distribution point for premium content from educational publishers and other premium content providers, targeted to the specific academic subject need of the student.

For more information about Xplana, visit www.xplana.com

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