data portability

 

Image via CrunchBase

Cloud Computing, Cloud Services, Web Services, Web 2.0. Each has its own definition, overlapping with the others to a greater or lesser extent. What it means to the man on the street (or on his or her laptop or mobile), though, is that we’re increasing trusting our valuable (to us, at least) information to a service somewhere out there on the Internet.

For some, this could mean just a webmail account with Gmail or Hotmail and profiles with Facebook and Flickr. For Web Workers (e.g. bloggers and freelancers) it could mean a whole lot more (accounting records, archives, contacts, work in progress, etc.).

Sometimes we get a none too gentle reminder about the risks of Cloud Computing.

To put things in very simplistic terms, the risks are two:

• Risk of inaccessibility. (You don’t have access to your data.)
• Risk of inappropriate accessibility. (The wrong people have access to your data.)

Either of these risks could be the result of human error or a hardware or software failure at the service provider. Data shops are usually pretty good at handling such outages, however. It’s far more likely that problems will result from your Web 2.0 service having a nasty brush with Economy 1.0.

Here's another great video presentation about the Semantic Web; I transcripted all the main parts here below.

Text transcription:

The Internet as we know it today is in an extending success: more than 1.300.000.000 (1,3 billions) people are connected to the Web across the globe.

In 2006, 161 EB of informations were created or replicated world wide.
IDC estimates the increase over 6 times this metric by 2010 – to 988 EB, or to 1 ZB a year.
More generic estimates are that while current new technical informations double every two years, by 2010 this will be every 72 hours.

The development is driven by users, as well as by technology.
Web 2.0 changed users to creators of content.

Platform like MySpace – which seen as a country would be the fourth largest in the world, with 250 millions registered users – are going to transform the traditional ways of making business connections, networking & community building.

Whilst the number of users and the amount of content is growing faster and faster, the Internet is departing from computers. More than one billion users of mobile phones already have the opportunity to access the Internet – and this number will grow to four billions within the next few years.

New technologies

I'd like to quote the mission statement from the SWSE homepage, a "Semantic Web Search Engine" project attempting to crawl the web of data – including RSS, FOAF, RDF vocabularies...

Although the Semantic Web (SW) is still very much in its infancy, there is already a lot of data out there which conforms to the proposed SW standards (e.g. RDF and OWL). Small vertical vocabularies and ontologies have emerged, and the community of people using these is growing daily. People publish descriptions about themselves using FOAF (Friend of a Friend), news providers publish newsfeeds in RSS (RDF Site Summary), and pictures are being annotated using various RDF vocabularies. The amount of available formal data is growing steadily, but a means to find and thus utilize this data is still missing. What is needed is the equivalent of the services a search engine currently provides for the HTML-web: a service which continuously explores and indexes the Semantic Web and provides an easy-to-use interface through which users can find the data they are looking for. We are therefore developing a Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE, pronounced "swizzy").

You can also try out the prototype yourself at this address.

Source: SWSE Official Page

Related Posts:
Semantic Web: Some Key Points
SemTech 09: Semantic Search Key Points in Hakia Philosophy