Impact of Semantic Web and Cloud Computing Platform on Software Engineering

Abstract

Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Semantic Web or Web 3.0 is to transform the World Wide Web into an intelligent Web system of structured, linked data which can be queried and inferred as a whole by the computers themselves. This grand vision of the Web is materializing many innovative uses of the Web. New business models like interoperable applications hosted on the Web as services are getting implemented. These Web services are designed to be automatically discovered by software agents and exchange data among themselves. Another business model is the cloud computing platform, where hardware, software, tools, and applications will be leased out as services to tenants across the globe over the Internet. There are many advantages of this business model, like no capital expenditure, speed of application deployment, shorter time to market, lower cost of operation, and easier maintenance of resources, for the tenants. Because of these advantages, cloud computing may be the prevalent computing platform of the future. To realize all the advantages of these new business models of distributed, shared, and self-provisioning environment of Web services and cloud computing resources, the traditional way of software engineering has to change as well. This chapter analyzes how cloud computing, on the background of Semantic Web, is going to impact on the software engineering processes to develop quality software. The need for changes in the software development and deployment framework activities is also analyzed to facilitate adoption of cloud computing platform.