Semantics in Cloud Computing

February 10, 2009 Leave a Comment

Cloud Computing is about replacing desktop-based computing resources with internet-based ones. The driving concept is called Software as a Service (SaaS), according to which software applications are licensed for use as services provided to customers on demand. This is similar to how traditional utilities like electricity or water are charged.

The latest issue of the IEEE Intelligent Systems journal features Cloud Computing and includes an article on Semantic Web applications. The authors claim that the volume of computing resources on the cloud can help deal with the explosion of web data and the scalability problems of the Semantic Web. They describe a number of such initiatives: Hadoop’s MapReduce, as well as the HBase and Yahoo! Pig extensions. The purpose of these open-source platforms is large-scale processing of semantic RDF datasets without any scalability limits.

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Blogging with Calais

January 23, 2009 2 Comments

The Calais initiative by Thomson Reuters is an excellent example of Semantic Web technologies being smoothly incorporated into common web activities, such as blogging. It uses Natural Language Processing to analyze text and extract named entities (e.g. persons, companies), facts (e.g. employee positions), and events (e.g. mergers, acquisitions).

I have been using Calais in this blog, through the Tagaroo plugin for WordPress. While I type a post, Tagaroo analyzes the text using the Calais web service, and suggests relevant tags and Flickr images. So far, the plugin works very well, without any glitches. Its proposals are usually quite successful and most tags of this blog have been created this way.

Calais can currently analyze texts only in English and French, but more languages are on the way. Let’s hope we see support for Greek soon!

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The Semantic Web vision

January 14, 2009 Leave a Comment

The Semantic Web aims at expressing web content in machine-processable forms, so that it is maintained efficiently by software agents. In this way, the precision of search will be enhanced and logic reasoning on web data will be possible. The Semantic Web vision, as expressed by its main founder Tim Berners-Lee, is “giving information a well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation”.

In the following clip, Tim Berners-Lee explains the main concepts and technologies behind the Semantic Web:

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