Archive for category Standard
Clustered Triplestore Implementatins Can Scale Well
From an interview with Chris Bizer developer of 
Many companies start to build their own “corporate semantic web”, one of the first questions regarding the technical architecture is which triple store should be chosen. Can you recommend a method to pick the right one?
The performance of triple stores was a bottle neck a while ago, but things have improved a lot over the last two years. There are cluster editions of several triple stores now and when deployed on a proper server farm or cloud infrastructure, the stores scale very well. An indicator that might be helpful for choosing a store could be the results of the Berlin SPARQL benchmark which compares the query performance of various triple stores and SPARQL-to-SQL rewriters.
“JSON Has Dethroned XML for Pure Data Interchange”
Given browser vendor’s almost universal focus on improving JavaScript performance, it’s not hard to suspect that this is true, but it’s interesting to see confirmation in this quote from Brendan Eich (creator of JavaScript and current CTO of Mozilla foundation, developers of FireFox) taken from:
Brendan Eich explains ECMAScript Fifth Edition to you
referring to:
UCSD Libraries Public Access System Architecture
Posted by admin in Infrastructure, Standard on March 30th, 2009
Talis Connected Commons
“The terms of the offer are as follows: if you own, or are creating, a public domain dataset then you can store that data in the Platform as RDF, for free. We’re setting an initial cap of 50 million triples on each dataset, but thats should be plenty of space in which to collect some really interesting data. To qualify for the scheme, you need to be using either the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License or the recently launched Creative Commons CC0 license to publish your data. Anyone will then be able to freely access the stored data using the Platform services, without API keys and without usage limits. This means that your data will be wrapped in a ready made API right from the start.
The Platform API covers basic data management facilities, through to a configurable search engine and a fully compliant SPARQL endpoint. And with data being delivered in a range of formats including RDF/XML and JSON, there should be something there for everyone to get their teeth into no matter what kind of application you’re building or environment you’re working in.”
“The structured Web is growing all around us like stalagmites in a cave!” – Michael K. Bergman
AI³
Adaptive Information
Adaptive Innovation
Adaptive Infrastructure
The next Web of open, linked data – Tim Berners-Lee (TEDTalks : 2009)
Tim Berners-Lee exhorts the audience to grow a garden of linked data:
Don’t hug your data, he says. 
We need to open up the silos:
… and then he made everyone chant:
Tim Bray on the Future of the Web
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/tim-bray-future-of-web#
Tim Bray comments on the importance of Ajax, JavaScript, agile development methodologies, REST, open source, and cloud computing.
In case you’re not familiar with his work “Tim Bray launched one of the first public web search engines in ‘95, co-invented XML 1.0, co-edited “Namespaces in XML”, served on the W3C Technical Architecture Group, and co-chaired the IETF AtomPub Working Group. Currently, he serves as a Distinguished Engineer and Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems”
Here are some of his quotes from the article.
“Ajax is getting awfully good in particular with the advances that are being made in the browser technology with the increased compatibility between things like Firefox and Safari and so on and the new canvas element and the fact that the new browsers have these fantastically high performance JavaScript engines in them. I suspect that the gap in the ecosystem that lies between what you could achieve with Ajax and what you need something like Flash or JavaFX or Silverlight to achieve it’s not that big enough to be terribly interesting.”
“… from the business point of view we are going to see that a lot of traditional application planning a deployment cycles are simply going to be broken. The notion that you can use the waterfall model to spec out a project and start by buying Oracle licenses and hardware servers for seven figures and plan for deployment fourteen months from now, the senior VP isn’t going to sign off on that anymore. They are worried about getting over the next six weeks and not about the next fourteen months.
I think that this is probably a very powerful force, in favor of things like Agile methods and Open Source Software and the Cloud all the things that are both monetization on the point of value. Technologies that are going to succeed in a tough times are going to be the ones that are free to adopt, and cheap to deploy and then when they actually start to go to production that’s when you are willing to pay some real money for them, because you saw. So I think that moves us from services and support business model to big up front license and cost business model from deployment to the cloud as opposed to deployment into privately held servers. I think that it is easy to see a bunch of existing technologies, that are going to be encouraged and promoted like Agile like Cloud, like Open Source.”
“On the client, JavaScript is really going through a golden age JQuery is very very good, presumably the ease which you can achieve JavaScript effects without having to sweat too much about different kinds of browsers will continue to increase and get better”
“…it’s pretty clear that at the moment REST is the horse that most people are betting on.”
“I see very few instances of interesting new WS-* stuff being stood up. And I would think that as we move in a more service oriented and web oriented direction, increasing the interesting services are going to be RESTful. Kinds of services and the pressure to integrate with and use those will push things in the right direction.
Even Microsoft which was clearly the leader or co-leader with IBM with WS-* movement, in the next generation of WCF everything is starting to look a whole lot more RESTful and Microsoft Azure has built around AtomPub in large parts. The vendors are pulling and pushing and the services are pulling and pushing. So I think the movement will happen fairly organically.”
MIT Adopts Open-Access Policy
Posted by admin in Library World, Standard on March 25th, 2009
On March 19, the MIT faculty unanimously adopted a resolution that makes scholarly articles freely and openly available to the entire world.
Hal Abelson (MIT professor of computer science and engineering, who chaired the committee) writes:
Our resolution was closely modeled on similar ones passed last February by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and by the Harvard Law School, also passed by unanimous vote. Stanford’s School of Education did the same, as did Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government just last Monday.”
MIT Adopts an Open-Access Policy
also reported in:
What is Web 3.0?
This article appears to have been written in mid 2006, and as such seems especially forward thinking:
http://java.sys-con.com/node/236036
“The defining aspects of the Web 3.0 social experience may [include]:
* Two, that there are no pages. Information comes in packets of discrete units. You merge or cross them, as you need to.
* Three, that there are no Web sites. Existing Web sites are no longer meant for human eyes. They act as indexes to the information, which is accessible via XML request. Exceptions to this will not be Web sites, but independent little islands of commerce or games.”
…
Jonathan Schwartz – Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps
Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps (1 of 4)
“… I’m neither worried about the role information technology will play in the economy, nor am I worried about the relevance of Sun’s offerings. I’m not worried about the future, I’m focused on its arrival date.”
1. Technology Adoption
2. Commercial Innovation
3. Efficiently Connecting 1. and 2.
“…general purpose microprocessors and operating systems are now fast enough to eliminate the need for special purpose devices. That means you can build a router out of a server – notice you cannot build a server out of a router, try as hard as you like. The same applies to storage devices.
“At Sun, open source isn’t for servers. Open source is for datacenters.”
“The second, and arguably more important headwind was a decision made back in the 1990’s to cancel Solaris on Intel, in the belief it would protect Sun’s SPARC hardware business. Conversely, that mistake destroyed a generation of Solaris developers, and accelerated the rise of alternatives to traditional SPARC hardware. And now you understand why we prioritize developers – they are the seeds from which great forests grow. If you don’t water the roots, the trees wither.
But how do you make money giving software away to developers? Well, let’s switch gears, and talk about Software and Services.”
“When Free is Too Expensive
Numerically, most developers and technology users have more time than money. Most readers of this blog are happy to run unsupported software, and we are very happy to supply it. For a far smaller population, the price of downtime radically exceeds the price of a license or support – for some, the cost of downtime is measured in millions per minute. If you’re tracking packages or fleets of aircraft, running an emergency response network or a trading floor, you almost always have more money than time. And that’s our business model, we offer utterly exceptional service, support and enterprise technologies to those that have more money than time. It’s a good business.”
“…open source platforms generate, alongside the services attached to them, over a billion dollars a year, making Sun by far and away the world’s largest open source software company.”
Recent Comments