On 7/23/13 8:45 PM, John Bottoms
wrote:
Kingsley ,
I have quite a few tools in my work shop. When I start to
make something I get the tools that I need for that work.
Size matters when it comes to sawing. It helps if I had
made the object before, or something similar.
There are quite a few tools out there now that can be used
for ontological work. We wouldn't want to duplicate
effort. But clearly, as your link points out, the tool
needed for a task is entailed from the goal.
There are goals of the SW that have been discussed and
some tools exist to help accomplish some of those goals.
It seems that there are a number of subgoals, some of
which have been met and some of which have not been
described succinctly. The scope matters also. Which did
you have in mind?
Tools include:
1. middleware for generating fine-grained structured data
(endowed with machine-readable entity relationship semantics)
from coarse-grained structured data
2. HTTP URIs are also a tool for entity denotation (naming)
that can optionally include resolution document content - this
enables the construction of web-like (or webby) structured
data delivered as document content
3. SPARQL query editors -- like their SQL counterparts, these
enable creation of globally accessible queries while also
enabling the sharing of query results and their definitions
4. Browser plugins and extensions -- which enhance existing
browsers such that they can be used to create, save, edit, and
share web-like structured data (endowed with machine-readable
entity relationship semantics).
JohnS:
Yes, I agree those three words, "diversity, heterogeneity,
and interoperability" at key but they strike me as
features or facets, not goals. I believe we need to state
a goal for a tool that has not already been addressed.
1-4 enable non-disruptive exploitation of the technologies
that are generally referred to as "the semantic web" stack.
I agree with John about the need to embrace and extend
existing solutions using the semantic web technology stack.
Unfortunately, this approach isn't the norm and its a large
reason why we still have a lot of confusion-driven-inertia
swirling around the "semantic web" meme and the technologies
that comprise its stack.
To answer John's question precisely, major Web players such as
Amazon haven't embraced the stack (in overt ways) because
their developers either find the technology confusing or they
find it too disruptive to implement bearing in mind existing
legacy infrastructure. That said, the likes of Facebook,
Google, and Microsoft are increasing their use of these
technologies. The same applies to the U.S., UK, and many other
countries.
In my eyes, the biggest irony around "the semantic web" is the
fact that at its core lies a power collection middlerware --
based on the architecture of the World Wide Web -- that's
artificially obscured by poor narratives and overly provincial
marketing.
Kingsley
-John Bottoms
FirstStar Systems
Concord, MA USA
On 7/23/2013 7:54 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
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
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John,
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.
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].
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.
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..
Links:
[1] http://dbpedia.org/describe/?url="">
-- Description of a Tool
[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!)
[3] http://bit.ly/Y4aHx9
-- Amazon EC2 AMI for Virtuoso
[4] http://bit.ly/NzIm3t
-- G+ note explaining AMI setup.
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--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
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