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Nodalities

From Semantic Web to Web of Data

Amazon Web Services Start-Up TourNovember 11

Last week I was at the London leg of the Amazon startup tour, the afternoon began with an short talk from Adam Selipsky, VP of Amazon Web Services, who gave overview of the origins and principles of AWS and a basic lesson in the utility and economics of cloud computing. Next up was Simone Brunozzi, Technology Evangelist for AWS Europe (http://twitter.com/simon), who got into more depth about the specifics of the more commonly discussed Amazon services (i.e. not Flexible Payment System/Mechanical Turk etc). He noted that there are currently upwards of 400,000 registered developers in the AWS program.

S3

There are currently over 29,000,000,000 objects are currently stored in S3, and the service has seen growth of around 3600% in the past 2 years
One of the lesser known features of S3 is its automatic scaling. S3 automatically places replicas of each object stored into multiple datacentres for redundancy and fault tolerance. What it also does is to automatically increase and decrease the number of distributed replicas in step with demand. So if a particular file suddenly becomes popular, S3 will create more replicas to handle the higher download rate. When that demand subsides, the number of replicas is reduced

EC2

EC2 is probably the service we make most use of at the moment, mainly for cre

Semantic Web and the Cloud have much in commonNovember 11

Here on Nodalities we tend to focus upon discussion of the Semantic Web, with an emphasis on the Web bit.

In our writing, as in our coding work inside the company, we remain very conscious that the Linked Data mantra we have taken to heart is part of a broader social, economic and technological picture. The technologies of the Semantic Web stack, too, are just components in a broader toolkit that must be used in building real applications and services that will scale to meet genuine business requirements now and in the future.

Cloud Computing is receiving a lot of press at the moment, doubtless aided by Microsoft’s entry into the space with Azure. Interestingly, it is also possible to detect a shift in the language of Cloud Computing’s enthusiasts that resonates increasingly strongly with some of our own observations. No longer ‘just’ a cheap, responsive and scalable adjunct to the corporate data centre, Cloud Computing services are finally being perceived as key drivers toward the Web of Data; even champions of the old model such as Salesforce now see enabling third party access to corporate data as a core aspect of their value proposition.

In a post here, I’ve tried to explore this in a little more detail. The worlds of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web are moving closer together, and some fusio

SWIG-UKNovember 10

Tomorrow a group of us are off to visit Bristol for the SWIG-UK meetup that HP Labs are kindly hosting. Leigh is giving a talk on using the Talis Platform to publish data and I am running a lightning talks session which should be fun and, hopefully, informative. This time there is a single track with some top quality content which makes things a lot simpler. It should be a good day with lots of time to meet people and catch up with the vast amount of things going on in the Semantic Web space.

A data-centric viewNovember 6

Justin’s been talking about viewing the future from a data-centric perspective, rather than application or software-centric. I came across an interesting example of a data-centric approach over on flickr. Flickr hosts a huge number of images, and quite a bit of metadata alongside these. This metadata includes camera used, aperture, lighting information and dates among others.

Here, however, they’ve been taking a look at their geo-data. With increasing numbers of cameras and camera-phones capturing geographic location, flickr have been able to create some very interesting visualisations which illustrate the surfaced connections amongst this huge stockpot of data. By plotting shapes to encompasse these locations, and mashing them up with names at various levels (e.g. neighbourhood, city, province, country continent); they could begin chipping away regions which are not photographed. The resulting alpha shapes strongly resonate with named geographic locations.

in other words, flickr, without recourse to a map, have created visualisations of their data which represent named geographic locations.(http://flickr.com/photos/straup/2972131146/)

Check out their project page for more (and better-explained

Network EffectsNovember 5

Last week in my Utility Cloud Computing post, I promised to write a follow-up exploring network effects for platforms as a service (PaaS). This was sparked by an interesting exchange between Nick Carr and Tim O’reilly with commentary on the Smoothspan blog.
I think the important point to explore can be summarised as “software versus data” for the next big network effect driven opportunity.  Smoothspan argues for the software angle and Tim for the data angle.
For me this turns on a critical distinction between platforms for direct versus indirect network effects. (Take a few minutes to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect if you want a good introduction to network effects.)

The software industry is well aware of the defensibility of network effects; and no one can possible miss the incredible defensibility of the Windows empire. It is tempting to take a pattern that has succeeded before and copy it. But it is wise to consider whether certain critical factors may be different now. Microsoft built a platform business model that harnessed indirect network effects. One way to think of indirect network effect is value built by the availability of complimentors rather than by the activity of individual users. The more windows applications: the more reason for a user to choose windows, the more u