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.