Welcome to the Talis Library Platform News

To paraphrase Col. John "Hannibal" Smith from the 1980s TV series The A-Team - "I love it when a plan starts coming together". Looking back on 2007 I believe we will say that it was the year that the Semantic Web plan started to come together.

Although first discussed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in the 1990s, it is only now that we are starting to see the emergence of real moves to enable his vision. From our point of view at Talis, there have been three major developments on this front in the last twelve months. The Talis Platform, and its specialisation for the library world The Talis Library Platform, a software-as-a-service platform for building applications with Semantic Web technologies at its core.

Two other milestones are the launch of Talis Engage - the first commercial application built on such a Semantic Platform and the launch of the Open Data Commons Licence, with Creative Commons, facilitating the open sharing of data which will help drive the adoption of data interconnection that will in turn drive the Semantic Web forward. This issue of the Library Platform News contains articles on all three of these.

Looking forward to an even more exciting 2008.

If you are new to the newsletter sign up, pass it on and tell your colleagues about it and join us in creating a community that shares, innovates and learns from each other. If you would like to contribute an article or offer comments please email richard.wallis@talis.com.

Richard Wallis, Editor

Licensing Open Data - Creative Commons and Talis have something to say

Paul Miller

As you may have noticed, we announced the birth of the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence this week, following up on Lawrence Lessig's unveiling at Creative Commons' fifth birthday party in San Francisco in the wee hours of our Sunday morning. Happy Birthday, Creative Commons, and we look forward to building upon this relationship for many birthday parties to come!

Regular watchers of Talis will be aware that we've had an interest in data for a long time, and that we've been active in the licensing issues behind Open Data for a couple of years now. Today's announcement is an important milestone in that journey, but we're not finished yet.

Back in 2006, we released our first public attempt at an open data licence, the Talis Community Licence, and began to use it for some early submissions to The Talis Platform. In building a Platform, we recognised from the outset the importance of recognising - and celebrating - the rights of those contributing their data to the shared pool. The Talis Community Licence allowed us to do that.

During 2007, our interest continued to grow. In public, we convened a workshop on Open Data at the World Wide Web Conference in Banff in the Spring, and reached out to Jordan Hatcher and Charlotte Waelde over the Summer, to help us extend the principles of the Talis Community Licence to the global stage. That they did, and over the past couple of months we've all been beavering away to align their initial offering with a parallel activity incubated within Creative Commons.

It's been fascinating to work closely with Science Commons during this process, and I've also welcomed the opportunity to work with Jordan and Charlotte again in dotting legal 'i's and crossing initially incomprehensible 't's. Together, they have produced a vitally important component in the toolkit that will encourage and facilitate real sharing of data. There is more to come, but the steps announced today mean that we can all move forward in lowering the walls of our silos, releasing data to play its part in the Data Web. All of us invest heavily in collecting and curating data, which is traditionally locked away and left to atrophy, failing to achieve anything like its true potential. Appropriately released and sensibly licensed, data held by everyone of us can contribute hugely to the promise of the Semantic Web. Here, the whole really is far greater than the sum of its parts.

Meet the Team

Ross Singer, Interoperability & Open Standards Champion.

This month’s “Meet the Team” is with Ross Singer, Interoperability & Open standards champion, at Talis. The extravagant job title actually represents a role responsible for developing standards for the Talis Platform, enabling developers to build new, diverse applications.

Ross joined us in October 2007 from Georgia Tech Library, Atlanta. At Talis, he is working across various projects such as opening up standards-based API access to library systems regardless of vendor, and tools to aid the integration of research and scholarly activities within and between academic institutions.

“I have been working in libraries for roughly 12 years. As a developer, I have always been aware of Talis, mainly through the Code4Lib community. To be working for Talis has been a great shift into innovative processes. Coming from a background where resources are tight and there is usually one developer starting and completing the project, Talis is a new world of resources, surrounded by a team encouraging my skills to expand, adapt and develop as we work on projects together.

Based in Georgia there is a significant time difference between me and my team, but despite this, we have regular IRC conversations, conference calls with smooth online tracking of activities between us. It is great to see when I arrive online, how projects have developed while I have been sleeping. I am usually just having my breakfast when the team is almost finished for the day! Managing our projects effectively across the team is essential for us and it's working well so far.”

Podcast of the Month

Library 2.0 Gang on the Library Software Manifesto

The Library 2.0 Gang met to discuss the Library Software Manifesto published by OCLC's Roy Tennant. He is joined by John Blyberg - Darien Library, Carl Grant - Care Affiliates, Jonathan Rochkind - John Hopkins University Libraries, and Rob Styles - Talis. In this round table discussion, hosted by Talis' Richard Wallis, the Gang discusses the relationship between libraries and library system vendors, the effects of open source and what could be done to improve this business relationship.

Talis Engage the first application for a Semantic Web Platform

Ian Corns

Talis Engage is the first application to be written on the Talis Semantic Web Platform. The team used the same set of APIs that are open to anyone taking a store on the Platform and developing their own solution - so if Talis Engage is an indicator of what's to come, then things certainly look promising!

Although Talis Engage was developed as a community information solution for libraries, taking a step back allows you to see what Talis Engage allows you to do - describe, relate and discover resources. The foundation of the solution is Record Types, providing organisations with the ability to assign a set of highly-configurable attributes to describe "a thing" - for example, the attribute type (small text, checkbox, configurable select, associate binary or hyperlink, etc), user-defined index across single or multiple attributes, display options, user permissions, etc. Parallel to this, Talis Engage supports a full taxonomy management tool. Utilising SKOS from the W3C, Talis Engage is initially shipped with the IPSV which Talis converted into SKOS format. However, users can build their own taxonomy from scratch or can extend the taxonomy they import.

As users create and maintain records, they can create direct associations between records by stating "this building is associated with this person" or "this organisation is associated with this event" whilst building up indirect associations through the use of the controlled taxonomic terms or uncontrolled tags. The benefits are subtly visible, especially when considering a single tenancy in its own right, with the complex network of user-defined relationships expressed in multiple ways aiding the end-users' discovery process, especially the serendipitous one. The results of this can be seen in a demonstration tenancy of Talis Engage available for you to play with. See how this page about Sarehole Mill is associated with other entries such as the page for John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

It's when we gaze into the future, consider what a semantic platform actually has the potential to provide, that it gets interesting. Lets consider some scenario's. Maybe we have 10 stores of community information operated by different organisations - using RDF to infer relationships within this data, or alternatively applying user-generated metadata (taxonomy, associations), the organisation can connect data with minimal or no effort, exposing hidden relationships and thus benefiting the end users experienced greatly. By adding an alternative store to this, say a library catalogue, we can begin to connect data between our once "hidden silos" very easily. A user discovers a building record for "Sarehole Mill", a biographical record for Tolkien, who wrote "these books" which were made into "these films" by "this director" - so, from "Sarehole Mill" to "Peter Jackson" in four simple steps. This is what the Semantic Web is, this is what the "connecting data" means. Still considering this - take a look at this example in DBpedia.

As more semantic data is published, and the means to both expose and query these data relationships grows, we can begin to understand why Tim Berners-Lee is so passionate about the Giant Global Graph and how we are approaching a new wave in user experience and discovery. The Talis Platform is part of that, Talis Engage is, and you can be too. Contact richard.wallis@talis.com or paul.miller@talis.com, get a store, build the future...

Worth Watching

Talis Insight Conference

There are many videos of the presentations from the recent two day Talis Insight Conference in Birmingham that are worth watching. They are linked from the Conference Programme. Some of the highlights include the opening keynote session from Euan Semple, A conversation with the Future - an inspiring discussion with five young librarians, chaired by Frances Hendrix, and the Semantic Web and Libraries - from Technology Evangelist, Richard Wallis. These are just some of the videos available, alongside the slides from most sessions.

Meet the API

Facet Browsing

This month we take a look at the Facet API for a Talis Platform Store. Like Item Query and Augmentation, the subject of previous Meet the API articles, Facet is a standard API available on every Platform store. Facets have become the must have feature of library and other search interfaces, enabling a user to drill down in to results of more relevance to the subject they are searching for. Supplementing the Item Query, the Facet API provides the ability to simply create a fully faceted search interface for data held in a Platform Store.

Let's take a look at the API. As with all Platform APIs, if you do not give it any parameters it provides a nice friendly form for you to experiment with. Open a browser and click your way to the Facet API for the Platform Store containing bibliographic records from UK libraries ukbib: http://api.talis.com/stores/ukbib/services/facet

The parameters you will be asked for are:

Search - This takes the same search parameters as the Item Query API that we detailed in Meet the API in Issue 2.
Fields - A comma separated list of indexed fields in the store. These will vary depending on the configuration of the individual store, but for a bibliographic store they include author, title, date, subject, and date.
Maximum facets to return - Defaulting to 10, this controls the maximum number of elements in each facet set to return.
Output as - Defaulting to 'xml', this controls the output to be either in xml or html.

For an initial try out enter 'hamlet' as a search, 'author,date,subject' as fields, set number of facets to '10' and select 'html' output. By using html output you will be able to see and then traverse the facets of the results.

For each facet, in the facet groups, there are two links. Get items - this links to the Item Query API for the Store, with the query constructed to return the set of items that are within that facet. Browse facets - this links to another call on the facet API, with the search query adjusted to only include the results within that facet. Try experimenting with various search queries, browsing through the facets and result items. As you do this, watch the way in which the search query evolves, and how the url in the browser address bar is constructed to achieve the desired effect.

When you are comfortable with the functionality of the API, try selecting 'xml' for output and taking a look at the xml you get - you may need to use the view source option in your browser. Inspection of the xml and comparing it with the html version will show how the data that is returned can be used to build a faceted interface. For more information on the facet and other APIs, check out the Platform Store User and Reference guides in the Talis Developer Network.

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