I’ve been asked to give a 30 minute talk on biomedical semantics in the cloud at the Molecular Med Tri Con in the symposium on cloud computing. Here’s what I know about what’s going on in this area at the moment:
- LexEVS is available as a AMI: https://cabig-kc.nci.nih.gov/Vocab/KC/index.php/Cloud_Computing_Services
- A Virtuoso Universal Server is available as an AMI: http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/dataspace/dav/wiki/Main/VirtInstallationEC2
- I’m pretty sure NCBO is doing something here, but I can’t find any specifics.
- Will Stardog be available as an AMI or similar?
So that’s on the “semantics using the cloud” side, but I really think that there’s a lot of potential going the other way: using semantics to discover data and services in the cloud. SADI has the ability to discover and link services through ontologies. It’s similar to SAWSDL (in fact, they wrap SAWSDL services), but they don’t bother with the extra layer, and just let the service process RDF directly. When SADI services are deployed to the cloud, it’ll solve a big problem for people who want others to use their services/algorithms without the overhead of maintaining those servers themselves. In fact, with the Amazon DevPay structure, it’s possible for small labs to release datasets, databases, and algorithms to the world and not have to pay to support it.
I say when, not if, because my implementation of SADI in Python is almost ready for deployment through Google App Engine (which can be deployed in AWS or other systems using AppScale), and from what I hear, it won’t take much work to do the same with the Java implementation. Between this and the extreme portability of python SADI services (it’s just a script), use in the cloud and redeployment to private clouds is going to be trivial.
So I’m asking folks, am I full of it? Also, what else is there out there? Please help me out so that we all get some good exposure!
