Ontologies

Maleeha Arif Yasvi — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 13:27:39 +0000

Ontologies come under the field of Semantic Web (Artificial Intelligence). These are the representation of a particular domain. All the relationships , entities and individuals involved in the concept can be easily represented via an ontology. Ontologies are helpful as they help in the knowledge representation which can be shared and re-used across a particular domain.
Ontology of a particular domain constitutes the classes, properties and the individuals associated with it. The properties can be object property and data properties. Object property link the two classes with each other, so therefore they signify relationship between two classes. Data Properties link the classes with the data type they hold. This all can be explained through an example-
Consider we have to form the ontology of the domain- 'School'. The classes that can be included for this ontology are- People, Classroom, Departments, Location etc. These classes can further be divided into sub-classes. People class can have sub-classes as- Student, Faculty, Staff. Similarly, the department class can be sub-divided into sub-classes based on different departments.The object properties for the school domain can be - teaches : connecting two sub-classes Student and Teacher i.e Teacher teaches Student. Another object property can be- studiesIn : connecting Student and Classroom i.e Student studiesIn Classroom. Several other object properties can be constructed. The data properties for this domain can be - hasRollNumber : connecting Student with integer data type i.e Student hasRollNumber int. Similarly, hasName can be used to associate the name of the person with String data type.
Apart from representing classes and properties, individuals can also be represented in an ontology. Example- Ram (teacher) teaches Ajay (Student).
The ontologies can be driven by using a software called as Protege. Protege helps in constructing an ontology. The naming convention followed by the ontology is generally the lower camel case i.e the classes, individuals are written with the first letter as the capital letter while as the properties are written with the first word in lower case and the second words first alphabet in upper case. Example- hasRollNumber.
While constructing the properties, cardinality can also be specified that is whether the relation is 1:1 or n:1 or n:n.
When an ontology is made, it should be able to answer a particular set of competency questions. The competency questions are a set of questions that can be used to answer particular queries related to the ontology. These are used to check the efficiency of the ontology.
Example- For the School domain, the competency questions can be- Where is the school? Where does the student study/play?
So, ontologies are helpful in sharing and re-using of knowledge. These represent the concepts of a domain via the relationships between the classes.

Building Stateful Applications With Nimbella Serverless Platform

Maleeha Arif Yasvi — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 11:22:58 +0000

Serverless platforms help us to build applications and services without having to manage the infrastructure. By using a serverless platform, the developer no longer has to worry about the physical hardware concerns. These platforms are cost-effective and have enhanced agility for development. There are several serverless frameworks such as AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions. These serverless platforms are for computing and still require some level of management of the operating system and the web server software process. These do not handle issues of memory and storage integration with serverless compute. One platform that I came across that is handling the concerns related to memory and storage integration, is Nimbella.
On closer look: Nimbella is a serverless cloud platform that is primarily designed to address the challenges developers face in adopting serverless computing model.
One of the major challenges with the serverless frameworks of today is their lack of support for stateful applications. Stateful applications are the ones that save the data from the activities of one session which have to be used in another session. This challenge of the lack of stateful support is overcome by Nimbella. The developers using Nimbella platform only have to code the logic and the rest like the storage and resource management, logging, monitoring has to be left on Nimbella. Nimbella handles it. So, it makes things easier for the developer and this support helps to build dynamic applications. The dynamic applications need support of the server and the data keeps on changing frequently. The entire dynamic infrastructure is handled by Nimbella’s platform and the developers can do what they do best and what they love, code the business logic!
Nimbella is based on an open-source serverless platform,Apache OpenWhisk. It saves the execution sequence of a running process and its contents are updated and managed automatically by this platform. So, it helps in transferring the results of one function to the other function. Nimbella cloud is deployed on top of Kubernetes. It is done so as to build containerized applications and to normalize the variances in different clouds.
Other platforms present do not support integration. But, with Nimbella, developer does not have to worry about the integration as it is supported natively by Nimbella. Also, the other existing platforms present are not cloud portable. So, therefore if the developer at any time feels a need to change the underlying cloud, he/she has to rewrite the code again to work with new cloud vendor APIs. This problem is also solved by Nimbella as it is a cloud-agnostic serverless platform. It can run on public, private and hybrid clouds. So the code can run on all clouds or local machines or a dedicated infrastructure thus supporting public, private or hybrid clouds.
Hence, Nimbella helps developers to address the challenges they face while working in serverless computing environment. Nimbella’s literal meaning is - “Beautiful Cloud” and surely it makes sense as Nimbella makes our serverless cloud computing experience beautiful.

DEV Community: Maleeha Arif Yasvi

Ontologies

Building Stateful Applications With Nimbella Serverless Platform