What is it?

A pre-installed edition of Virtuoso for Amazon's EC2 Cloud platform.

What does it offer?

From a Web Entrepreneur perspective it offers:
  1. Low cost entry point to a game-changing Web 3.0+ (and beyond) platform that combines SQL, RDF, XML, and Web Services functionality
  2. Flexible variable cost model (courtesy of EC2 DevPay) tightly bound to revenue generated by your services
  3. Delivers federated and/or centralized model flexibility for you SaaS based solutions
  4. Simple entry point for developing and deploying sophisticated database driven applications (SQL or RDF Linked Data Web oriented)
  5. Complete framework for exploiting OpenID, OAuth (including Role enhancements) that simplifies exploitation of these vital Identity and Data Access technologies
  6. Easily implement RDF Linked Data based Mail, Blogging, Wikis, Bookmarks, Calendaring, Discussion Forums, Tagging, Social-Networking as Data Space (data containers) features of your application or service offering
  7. Instant alleviation of challenges (e.g. service costs and agility) associated with Data Portability and Open Data Access across Web 2.0 data silos
  8. LDAP integration for Intranet / Extranet style applications.

From the DBMS engine perspective it provides you with one or more pre-configured instances of Virtuoso that enable immediate exploitation of the following services:

  1. RDF Database (a Quad Store with SPARQL & SPARUL Language & Protocol support)
  2. SQL Database (with ODBC, JDBC, OLE-DB, ADO.NET, and XMLA driver access)
  3. XML Database (XML Schema, XQuery/Xpath, XSLT, Full Text Indexing)
  4. Full Text Indexing.

From a Middleware perspective it provides:

  1. RDF Views (Wrappers / Semantic Covers) over SQL, XML, and other data sources accessible via SOAP or REST style Web Services
  2. Sponger Service for converting non RDF information resources into RDF Linked Data "on the fly" via a large collection of pre-installed RDFizer Cartridges.

From the Web Server Platform perspective it provides an alternative to LAMP stack components such as MySQL and Apace by offering

  1. HTTP Web Server
  2. WebDAV Server
  3. Web Application Server (includes PHP runtime hosting)
  4. SOAP or REST style Web Services Deployment
  5. RDF Linked Data Deployment
  6. SPARQL (SPARQL Query Language) and SPARUL (SPARQL Update Language) endpoints
  7. Virtuoso Hosted PHP packages for MediaWiki, Drupal, Wordpress, and phpBB3 (just install the relevant Virtuoso Distro. Package).

From the general System Administrator's perspective it provides:

  1. Online Backups (Backup Set dispatched to S3 buckets, FTP, or HTTP/WebDAV server locations)
  2. Synchronized Incremental Backups to Backup Set locations
  3. Backup Restore from Backup Set location (without exiting to EC2 shell).

Higher level user oriented offerings include:

  1. OpenLink Data Explorer front-end for exploring the burgeoning Linked Data Web
  2. Ajax based SPARQL Query Builder (iSPARQL) that enables SPARQL Query construction by Example
  3. Ajax based SQL Query Builder (QBE) that enables SQL Query construction by Example.

For Web 2.0 / 3.0 users, developers, and entrepreneurs it offers it includes Distributed Collaboration Tools & Social Media realm functionality courtesy of ODS that includes:

  1. Point of presence on the Linked Data Web that meshes your Identity and your Data via URIs
  2. System generated Social Network Profile & Contact Data via FOAF?
  3. System generated SIOC (Semantically Interconnected Online Community) Data Space (that includes a Social Graph) exposing all your Web data in RDF Linked Data form
  4. System generated OpenID and automatic integration with FOAF
  5. Transparent Data Integration across Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Twitter, and any other Web 2.0 data space equipped with RSS / Atom support and/or REST style Web Services
  6. In-built support for SyncML which enables data synchronization with Mobile Phones.

How Do I Get Going with It?