I have been thinking about this topic for quite some time. I never found
time to sit and put together my thoughts in a coherent fashion. It is about
Semantic Web and how it will blend into the current cloud computing paradigm. In
fact, I even have a provocative title for my future post. I have planned to call it
“Intelligence as a Service (InaaS)”. I can assure you that the post will be
published in this space in the early weeks of the new year.
Well, it would have stayed within my minds if not for the very well written post by Paul Miller on
the topic at ReadWriteWeb.
In the post he eloquently points out to the evolution of Cloud Computing beyond
the hype surrounding the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine,
Microsoft Azure, etc. He clearly highlights the role of data and poses the
following question
For now, then, we should conclude by asking what role the semantic web has to
play in any of this. The semantic web, with its unadulterated
recognition of the primacy of the web’s hyperlink? The semantic web,
designed from the outset to convey context and relationships derived from data
spread across the web? The semantic web, supported by technologies that
operate openly and on the scale of the web?
He also identifies where everything is going by talking about the world wide
database.
Yep, here we go, on a journey toward Kevin Kelly’s “World Wide Database,”
which will take in a lot of the shifts facing enterprise computing along the
way.
Bingo. He is right on target. I also think that we will be seeing what I call
as “Intelligence as a Service” with the help of the Semantic Web, the
scalability of Cloud Computing and Openness of the people’s mindset
(yes, as we evolved from the early days of desktop to the current data and apps
on the cloud era, our mind has been “opened up”. Thanks to the relentless
efforts by open source and open web advocates who worked hard to raise the
consciousness of the users on the importance of being open). Soon, we will be
able to tap into the clouds for intelligence just as we tapped into the power
grid for power and how, today, we tap into the clouds for computing resources.
I strongly urge everyone to read Paul’s post and it offers invaluable
insights into where the technology is headed. Maybe, we could tap into the
clouds for intelligence one day and use the free time we get because of it for
having fun like
French instead of slogging it out like Americans
or Japanese.
