KMi Seminars
Amazon's web services strategy
This event took place on Tuesday 25 July 2006 at 14:00

 
Jeff Barr Amazon Web Services

Amazon spent ten years developing the world-class technology and content platform that powers the Amazon web site for millions of customers every day. Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), you can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology. AWS now offers eight services with open APIs for developers to build applications. Learn how you can create innovative applications and then launch on-line businesses that make money. Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services Evangelist, will provide an overview of Amazon Web Services and show you the possibilities created by these innovative offerings.

Jeff Barr, Amazon's Technical Evangelist from the US, will be visiting the Open University at the invitation of the ICT department on Tuesday 25th July to give a high-level presentation of Amazon's web services strategy with in-depth examples of how developers are using the services to build applications for innovative business solutions.

Jeff is the Technical Evangelist for Amazon Web Services. In this role, focuses on helping the Amazon Web Services developer community achieve success in building innovative and successful businesses using Amazon.com data and technology.

He has held development and management positions at KnowNow, eByz, Akopia, and Microsoft, and was a co-founder of Visix Software. Jeff's interests include collecting and organizing news feeds using his site, www.syndic8.com. He holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the American University and has done graduate work in Computer Science at the George Washington University.

Related links:
AWS Main Page: http://aws.amazon.com
AWS Blog: http://aws.typepad.com

 
KMi Seminars
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.