ontolog-forum
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [ontolog-forum] Amazon vs. IBM: Big Blue meets match in battle for t

To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 19:54:58 -0400
Message-id: <51EF17D2.2020102@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On 7/23/13 1:00 PM, John F Sowa wrote:
> Amazon began life as a bookseller, and they extended their reach to
> become a very large retail supplier of almost everything.  But their
> service business has grown faster than their retail business:
>
> 
>http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/21/net-us-amazon-cloud-idUSBRE96K04B20130721
>
> Some excerpts:
>> After years of being dismissed as a supplier of online computer
>> services to startups and small businesses, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
>> beat out International Business Machines this year to snag a $600
>> million  contract with the Central Intelligence Agency.
>> Public cloud computing, which AWS pioneered in 2006, lets companies
>> rent computing power, storage and other services from data centers
>> shared  with other customers - typically cheaper and more flexible
>> than maintaining  their own.
>> Five companies vied for the contract - AWS, IBM, Microsoft, AT&T and
>> another  unidentified firm, according to a report on the bidding by
>> the U.S. Government  Accountability Office.
> My only knowledge of AWS comes from reading some of their documentation
> and some miscellaneous articles about it.  They provide some flexible,
> high-speed methods for indexing, finding, and updating anything in
> their clouds.
>
> But I noticed that 2006, when AWS started, is also the year when the
> DAML project finished its basic tools:  RDF, OWL, and SPARQL.  Amazon
> does not use any of those tools.  But I noticed that some people have
> stored data that contains RDF links in AWS.
>
> I also noticed that one of the Amazon tools, SimpleDB, is implemented
> in Erlang.  That language was designed to support concurrent processing
> with multiple threads, especially for use by large telecoms.
>
> AWS probably uses Erlang (or techniques inspired by Erlang) for other
> purposes, especially for their method of "autoscaling", which is
> "a feature that automatically adds or removes computing power in
> response to application use."  For a brief overview of Erlang,
> see http://www.erlang.org/faq/introduction.html .
>
>> "Auto-scaling is very complex and there are not many cloud providers
>> that can do it well, but Amazon is great at it," said Kyle Hilgendorf,
>> a cloud computing analyst at Gartner.
> Erlang is an example of the kinds of tools that mainstream developers
> are willing to adopt and use for mission-critical applications.  One
> more example:  Facebook uses Erlang to support their chat backend.
>
> Why haven't developers found a way to build multi-billion dollar
> technology on top of the SW tools?  They might provide some support
> for importing data from those tools, but they don't use them as the
> foundation for their technology.  Why not?
>
> John
>   
> _________________________________________________________________
> Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
> Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
> To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
>   
>
>
John,    (01)

We really need to establish what 'Tool' means [1] to push this 
discussion forward, coherently. Once the meaning of 'Tool' is 
established we still have the thorny issue of what a Semantic Web Tool 
is,  bearing in mind the aforementioned buzz-phrase is rife with 
confusion and controversy.    (02)

Personally,  I believe the World Wide Web has always been a Web of 
Semantically interlinked Data. The issue (in my eyes) is that over time 
the fidelity and machine-readability of the underlying entity 
relationship semantics are what continue to evolve [2].    (03)

I am an extensive (an very early) user of AWS. I use this platform to 
deploy very sophisticated solutions that leverage various aspects of the 
Semantic Web technology stack [3]. AWS itself will benefit immensely 
from Semantic Web technologies once we find a way to reduce the 
confusion (and provincial tendencies) swirling around this most 
important aspect of the Web.    (04)

Today, when making AWS based EC2 AMIs you will notice that are lacking 
on the data model front, and this makes automated construction and 
management of AMI's more difficult than it needs to be. Anyway, we are 
going to turn this data into Linked Data and then present it back to the 
folks at Amazon which could shed a lot of light on how these technology 
provides immediate value to a thorny problem they are grappling with etc..    (05)


Links:    (06)

[1] 
http://dbpedia.org/describe/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org%2Fresource%2FTool 
-- Description of a Tool    (07)

[2] http://bit.ly/10Y9FL1 -- Why I claim the World Wide Web was a 
Semantic Web (coarse-grained fidelity, on the machine-readability front) 
from inception (note: click on the links!)    (08)

[3] http://bit.ly/Y4aHx9 -- Amazon EC2 AMI for Virtuoso    (09)

[4] http://bit.ly/NzIm3t -- G+ note explaining AMI setup.    (010)

--     (011)

Regards,    (012)

Kingsley Idehen 
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Personal Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca handle: @kidehen
Google+ Profile: https://plus.google.com/112399767740508618350/about
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen    (013)

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature


_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/  
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/  
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ 
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J    (01)

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>