Amazon Web Services published almost one terabyte of knowledge, databases of different sorts are now available and accessible. Among them we can find US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, DBPedia Knowledge Base, Freebase Data Dump, Wikipedia Extraction and NCBI Genbank. This cloud of information can be processed with ease by creating EBS volume, basing it on the snapshot ID of the data, attaching created volume to a running EC2 instance in the same disk space and adding mount point and mount the EBS volume on the instance. Downloading these inconceivable dataset is not necessary any longer.

This can be found to be the milestone in starting the web cloud computing space. The main use for these cloud will be availing these information for bots, that will process them and support humans with their structured knowledge.

-mw

Hakia announced on its blog the coming of new system of semantic data organization. System is called QDEX, what stands for Query Detection and Extraction. To explain how it works in the simpliest words, we should take a look at system’s name - query detection - the system scans through the page content and prepares the list of all possible queries (different length and combinations of terms).

Right now this project is in experimentary phase. The biggest problem is how to reduce the number of possible queries, or rather how to leave out equivalent queries.

I write here also about methods of organizing information and the way how we can handle its surplus. These surplus is visible also in our desktops - where we save all files that we were going to read but it turned out that there wasn’t enough time. Sometimes it happens that one does not want to remove such files and keeps them on his dekstop for more conducive time.

BumpTop is a project annouced at least two years ago, than its presentation looked very impressive. They claimed that they were going to give us desktop in 3D, where icons can be moved and interact between each other according to laws of physics.

Most innovative feature was the possibility of creating piles of icons, for example of the same type or regarding the same case. BumpTOp also presented some fresh ideas on how to manage, sort and browse this piles. Everything was presented on video, published in June 2006:

Right now there is beta version available, but only for those, who were previously registered and accepted by authors of BumpTop. It looks like we have to wait for more opened tests.

BumpTop can be extremely helpful in handling with the choas on our desktops and of course, by the fact it has 3 dimensions the volume of possible data storage (number of files) increases - not only we can put files into piles, but also we can stick them to walls.

-mw