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?

Recent Posts

Some great new articles over at InfoWorld on the Cloud -

The dangers of cloud computing

What cloud computing really means

Early experiments in cloud computing

A step closer to the integrated cloud

Amazon's cloud computing service fuels startup's launch

Amazon adds resilience to cloud computing service

eCloudM the beginning

In mid-2006 I was starting to get that entrepreneurial feeling again. One year earlier, in August of 2005, we had completed the sale of the company I helped to found. All the way through the summer of 2006 there was tremendous focus on integrating our product lines. However that effort was coming to an end and I was starting to wonder about what was next.

About that time Mike Hill and I were re-introduced by a mutual friend, our lawyer David Steigerwald. Mike Hill had recently left the COO position at XAware, an XML Integration company he helped start. During some initial meetings Mike and I realized that we both had a passion for technology, entrepreneurship and good Irish beer.

We both knew that we wanted to start another company sometime in the future. Mike had done two successful startups and I had done one and been involved in another. That said we also knew that we did not want to do another startup similar to our previous companies. We started the process of figuring out where to look by creating a list of what we didn't want to do.

• We had no interested in trying to sell complex and expensive software to enterprises.
• Trying to create another Open Source version of a successful software product and charging some combination of service and support fees did not seem like our bag of tea.
  
• If possible we wanted to avoid the typical software company path of Idea --> Seed Capital --> Angel Investors --> Venture Round 1 --> Venture Round 2 --> Debt Financing --> Merger --> IPO/Out of business/Sell out.

We also had a few ideas that we did want to do.

• Explore the feeling that something, we were not sure exactly what, but something was happening out there on the Internet that seemed ... different.
• Get a better feel for how low the barriers to entry for software products was becoming due to technologies like AJAX, GWT, Web Services, OnDemand software, and better development paradigms.
• Work with new media technologies like Blogs, Online Advertising and Community Networks to gain a better understanding of what it takes to build value in today's Internet.
• Figure out if it was feasible to create a relatively virtual organization using the mushrooming set of online communication applications like Skype, Google Talk, GMail and Google Desktop Apps.

It ended up that the exploration and discussion around exactly these topics led us to that "something different" we thought was happening on the Internet. Our discussions generated a few conclusions.

• The barriers to entry in the Enterprise Software space were becoming gigantic. The up-front capital needed to start a company and compete against established vendors was moving upwards of the $50M mark.
  
• The ability to create good Internet software was becoming incredibly easy
• Much of the software market was becoming commoditized. The availability of cheap debt was financing a huge M&A spree, consolidating the Enterprise Software market down to a few Tier 1 players, and a slightly larger set of Tier 2 organizations.
• Companies like Google, eBay, Amazon and Yahoo were bringing an incredible array of platform capabilities into the On-Demand/Software as a Service (SaaS) space at very low price points (typically free).

All of this discussion and talk made us realize that the "something big" we were sensing was nothing other than the shift away from Enterprise Software products toward the adoption of On-Demand applications and community focused software. The term we found to describe this new computing platform was the Internet Cloud.

We had found what we were looking for, that shift in the status quo that destroys existing business plans and creates new opportunities. The next question was obviously "what do we do about it".