Orglex: Using AWS to Build Semantic Web Ontologies

Nik Rao of Orglex wrote to tell me about his site and about how they are using Amazon EC2, S3, and the Alexa Web Information Service to build their site.

Orglex is focused on providing information services to industry professionals in vertical markets such as health insurance, clinical trials, and venture capital. Their service has three facets: aggregated content specific to the industry, community and networking hubs for the industry, and a targeted recruiting platform.

Orglex usea EC2 and S3 to build and maintain domain-specific ontologies for each vertical market. In contrast to the usual top-down models hand-built by domain experts, their system extracts clues from the information and uses them in a scalable, bottom-up fashion.

The process of building and refining the algorithms is iterative in nature. The scalable nature of EC2 allows them to tune and re-run their algorithms as needed without the need for a dedicated compute cluster. Nik told me that the ability for them to scale up and down has really driven down the cost of experimentation for them and has allowed them to get to market quickly, and with a high quality product.

— Jeff;