[esip-semanticweb] Hosted VPS for summer tutorials

[judy]

Greetings,

This is a follow up to provide more details on my suggestion to use a 
hosted virtual private server (VPS) in summer meeting tutorials. A 
hosted VPS is an inexpensive and flexible means to acquire a dedicated, 
high-performance server (and bandwidth) configured and dedicated to the 
purpose of the tutorial(s), for the duration of the meetings (or longer? 
Attendees may want to continue to use the new tools for some limited 
period).

Depending on ESIP's planned use, prices are in the range of $100 (some 
prices are higher and some lower, reflecting configurations) monthly 
with no setup fees, no contracts, and servers are dynamically 
upgradeable at any time. The server is completely under the control of 
the account owner, with full root access, dedicated IP, a range of 64 
and 32-bit Linux images and distros, reserved RAM and Ajax console access.

I'm not sure that the tutorial subjects have been finalized, but my 
basic idea for the server was that many open source semantic tools are 
available to browsers, on the command line, and some as stand-alone 
GUIs. Browser-based tools and interfaces could be accessed universally 
by all attendees' laptops/netbooks/iPads. If necessary in some cases, to 
improve performance or illustrate differing configurations, multiple 
instances of a product could be installed. In the case of command line 
tools, server-based access (SSHd or similar) would assure dependencies 
are configured -- or attendees could choose between local access and 
using the server.

Here are some suggestions for semantic tools on the server or in 
combination with local access:
Illustrate the use of frameworks: Redland, Virtuoso, TDB/Jena
Illustrate RDF model building
Build-your-own SPARQL endpoint: Fuseki/TDB/Jena
Drupal 7 SPARQL views (newly ported from D6 -- queries and 'View-izes' 
SPARQL results)
RDFizers/RDF parsers/spongers/linked data extraction -> populate stores 
(GUI and command line)
Build-your-own-ontology
Walk-through with ontology browsers
(the list is endless...)

I know of two good hosted VPS services:
Linode.com http://www.linode.com/
Slicehost.com http://www.slicehost.com/

<disclosure>I have a linode VPS</disclosure>, and have seen a few 
benchmarks that show linode VPSs to have a performance edge -- but I 
think both companies are extremely reputable and would provide a good 
service.

Comments? Questions?

regards,

judy hertz