ABSTRACT
As stated in the earlier chapters, cloud computing is an emerging paradigm in the information technology and data processing communities. Enterprises utilize cloud computing services to outsource data maintenance, which can result in significant financial benefits. Businesses store and access data at remote locations in the cloud. As the popularity of cloud computing grows, the service providers face ever-increasing challenges. They have to maintain huge quantities of heterogeneous data while providing efficient information retrieval. Thus, the key emphasis for cloud computing solutions is scalability and query efficiency. Semantic web technologies are being developed to present data in a standardized way such that such data can be retrieved and understood by both humans and machines. Historically, web pages are published in plain Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) files, which are not suitable for reasoning. Instead, the machine treats these HTML files as a bag of keywords. Researchers are developing semantic web technologies that have been standardized to address such inadequacies. The most prominent standards are the Resource Description Framework (RDF) (World Wide Web Consortium, 2014a) and SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) (World Wide Web Consortium, 2014b). RDF is the standard for storing and representing data, and SPARQL is a query language to retrieve data from an RDF store. RDF is being used extensively to represent social networks, as we have discussed in Chapter 21. Cloud computing systems can utilize the power of these semantic web technologies to represent and manage social networks so that the users of these networks have the capability to efficiently store and retrieve data for data-intensive applications.
