Image via CrunchBase

(by Frank van Harmelen)

Amazon has just announced that they will host large public datasets for free access by anybody. These are as varied as the entire annotated Human Genome, large Chemistry datasets, US Census databases, etc. Interestingly for the Semantic Web, DBPedia, the hub of the Linked Open Data cloud, is also among the datasets, as is a dump of Freebase.

It’s interesting to see that there is a sound business case for Amazon doing this (attracting customers to their cloud services).

Now, if they only would triplify many of these datasources, that would make them even more useful, and would be a next major step for the Semantic Web…

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• Amazon Exposes 1 Terabyte of Public Data to Developers (readwriteweb.com)

(By Frank van Harmelen)

It’s a true-ism by now to say that the Linked Open Data initiative has been a hugely important driver for the Semantic Web in the past two years. But its emphasis on providing a large dataset seemed sometimes to go at the cost of ignoring the schema-side of things. It was therefore an important development that in September of this year, the OpenLink Software folk combined their UMBEL ontology (closely based on the OpenCyc ontology from LarKC participant Cyc) with the DBPedia data. 

A very good interview discussing the combination between the very large dataset (DBPedia) and the very large ontology (UMBEL/OpenCyc) can be found at http://blog.semantic-web.at/2008/11/10/umbel-dbpedia-futureweb-ecology-interview/.

Read this, click through on the rich links provided in there, and you’ll never doubt if there is an eco-system for large reasoning infrastructures such as LarKC!