Introduction to Semantic Web

Web 3.0 — the Semantic Web — is what folks are calling the third major wave of the Web. Interestingly, the principal inventor of the Web\ itself, Tim Berners-Lee, doesn’t much favor the idea of versioning the Web, and he views the Semantic Web as more aligned with his original vision anyway — which means that we’re actually just now seeing the evolution of a Web he was thinking about almost 20 years ago. Nova Spivak, an entrepreneur and Web visionary, has a compelling chart, similar to the one shown in Figure 1-1, that he uses to describe the Web 3.0 phenomenon.

Implementation of Sahana Disaster Management System during the Mudslide at Southern Leyte Philippines

On February 17, a devastating mudslide killed over 1,800 Filipinos in Guinsaugon in the southern part of Leyte Island in the Philippines. IBM contacted the Sahana core team at the Lanka Software Foundation on February 22 to request the deployment of Sahana.

            Sahana was customized and used to facilitate effective coordination and information-sharing among the National Disaster Coordinating Council member agencies, private sector and civil society groups involved in disaster response, relief and rehabilitation.

PHILIPPINES: Aid management goes automated

MANILA, 10 February 2012 (IRIN) - The Philippines government and an international aid agency are automating inventory systems to improve relief distribution in one of the world's most disaster-prone countries.

The World Food Programme (WFP) and Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) are undertaking a US$46,000 customization of an open-source software commonly used in disaster relief, Sahana, to develop a national relief goods inventory and monitoring system, or RGIMS.

Starbucks Coffee and Information Technology

Starbucks Coffee

Food Manufacturer

•         The idea of the siren used in the Starbucks logo originates from Herman Mellville’s Moby Dick

•         She is designed to mesmerize the coffee drinkers; to “lure them to the cup”

•         A slightly different logo was created for each coffee, and appeared beside it on the menu board as well as on the package of the coffee.

Not Only SQL

NoSQL database, also called Not Only SQL, is an approach to data management and database design that's useful for very large sets of distributed data.   NoSQL, which encompasses a wide range of technologies and architectures, seeks to solve the scalability and big data performance issues that relational databases weren’t designed to address. NoSQL is especially useful when an enterprise needs to access and analyze massive amounts of unstructured data or data that's stored remotely on multiple virtual servers in the cloud.