Part II - The Confluence of Cloud Computing & the Semantic Web - Heavy on the Semantics

The nuances of the dance between these two trends is indeed promising. The more I understand and learn about the Semantic Web from experts like Dean Allemang, and understand the utility of the Cloud, the more I appreciate the potential of these trends to shape distributed computing.

Recently, I have had the privilege off getting my hands dirty in supporting a client to develop, what they have termed, a Semantic SOA. The idea being that the discovery, governance and the structure and content of the payloads of the web-services within the architecture, are based on semantic models (ontologies). The underlying language of these models (Resource Description Framwork/RDF Schema/Web Ontology Language) explicitly support another important quality of SOA - semantic interoperability; which ensures that consumers and providers within the Cloud share germane and appropriate information in a consistent manner.

The big promises of Cloud Computing: economies of scale and improved resource utilization, align artfully with semantic principles and supporting features. Migration to the Cloud for many will be incremental and include the distribution of information across a virtualized infrastructure. Features of the technologies/specifications underlying the Semantic Web (RDF/RDFS/OWL) lend themselves to these requirements. They are intended to formally describe information concepts, terms and relationships within a domain. These specifications allow your subject-matter-experts to incrementally model their areas of expertise and because of their structure and underlying rules these domains/concepts can be easily combined to represent a verbose information model representing your data architecture. This model can then be used to aid discovery, invocation, XML Schema Defintion (XSD) / Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) definitions and integration in an incremental and unambiguous fashion.

Additionally, these features help describe entities and provide clear, non-ambiguous, semantics of a service offering. Service discovery and composition within the Cloud can all be supported by the features and standards of the Semantic Web.

Higher order specifications like RDFS and OWL support the concepts of inferencing. Inference relationships provide an eloquent and human understandable way to define and describe robust relationships between information concepts and data. Machines that consume these models will be able to infer additional information that may be useful to the consumer or application residing within the Cloud. The reality of it is, more and more of our data is going to be living in the Cloud and this data will be distributed. Pushing our data and applications out from internal information silos to Cloud based silos, has some benefits – reduced IT costs, support, maintenance, scalability, etc… But to have a virtualized infrastructure with scalable resources with applications and information distributed across the computing grid is a real benefit. With distribution comes complexity. We need our data to more useful to our business, our partners, anyone who might utilize our information. For it to be useful, it needs to maintain its integrity, its purpose and its meaning when combined with other data from other sources within the Cloud. Semantic concepts, like inferencing will do just that. Using a semantic model (metadata) we can start with some stated information and determine related and relevant information as tough it had been explicated stated. In the Cloud we need our data to more consistent and connected. With the distribution and virtualization of our systems, it will become imperative that our data become “smarter.” Semantic models will allow us to focus on informational concepts and smarter business processes and applications that reside in a scalable virtualized environment – the Cloud.

The Confluence of Cloud Computing & the Semantic Web – Part 1

In the following series of blogs I will attempt to capture the nuances of the dance between these two major mega trends – Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web.

For purposes of this blog, it is suffice to say that these emerging trends have yet to realize mainstream adoption. In fact, we are still grappling with the concepts and clarity of the real value.

Just in the last couple of days I have been exposed to surveys and articles that suggest cloud computing is low on the priority list for CIOs and not well understood Study: IT jobs will drop in 2009, and the real value of the Semantic Web is suspect - The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview.

Despite the skepticism and adoption rate, both of these mega trends promise to have disruptive influences on the way we do business. These mega trends are taking well established computing ideas, and expanding them and making them work across the Internet. For many, cloud computing is an extension of grid/utility computing, software as service (SaaS), managed services platforms, web-services and platform services – What cloud computing really means.

The Semantic Web, as described by Tim Berners-Lee is an extension of the existing web paradigm, where the target audience is the human. The new extension is intended to develop languages for expressing information in a machine processable form; interoperability taken to a new level.

Tim Berners-Lee defines the Semantic Web as a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines. “The Semantic Web is a web of data, in some ways like a global database.” - Semantic Web Road Map. The promise being that computers can search, acquire, present, filter, and manipulate data in a useful way based on the data’s meaning and its relationships. This is accomplished by defining structured sets of information and inference rules that allow machines to understand the relationship between different data resources.

One of the promises of the Semantic Web is ease of integration of information across a wide spectrum of data artifacts and systems. There are solutions to the data integration challenge but require extensive transformations and one-to-one mappings between elements across systems and repositories. What puts the promise of the Semantic Web above the fray is the ability to allow a machine to connect to any other machine and exchange and process data efficiently based on built-in semantic information that describes each resource. Metadata that allows machines to understand relationships and context. This semantic information allows disparate data sources to become compatible through adopting a consistent relational model across structured and unstructured information.

Conceptually the cloud represents a ubiquitous set of computing services that are interconnected and seamlessly exchange and process information. But as Galen Gruman accurately states, in his article, What cloud computing really means, “Today, with such cloud-based interconnection seldom in evidence, cloud computing might be more accurately described as "sky computing," with many isolated clouds of services which IT customers must plug into individually. On the other hand, as virtualization and SOA permeate the enterprise, the idea of loosely coupled services running on an agile, scalable infrastructure should eventually make every enterprise a node in the cloud.”

As these mega trends mature the confluence of the two may indeed bring to fruition the promise of loosely coupled ubiquitous services that have context and are ultimately understood by machines.

In the blogs that follow I will explore what all that really means and what is the real value?