Welcome to Talis Platform News

Welcome to the first issue of Talis Platform News for 2008, a year that promises to be a busy and interesting one for those interested in semantic technologies! Last year certainly ended well, with coverage such as that from Read/Write Web and Scientific American pointing to growing mainstream interest in the real practical potential of the Semantic Web.

In this issue we report on an important new licence to deliver the 'open data' that the Semantic Web will need if it is to grow. We also have a further instalment of Ian Davis' regular column, Danny Ayers writes about Cool URIs and using the Talis Platform to track conversations on Twitter, and I take a look at the 'Internet Inside' semantic applications.

I hope you find this issue of interest, and welcome suggestions for items you'd like to see covered in future issues. Don't forget to subscribe in order to receive an email reminder and highlights each month, and feel free to join us in IRC conversation over on the #talis channel hosted on freenode.net.

Paul Miller, Editor

Talis and Creative Commons launch new open data licence

Regular readers of this newsletter and our Nodalities blog will doubtless have noticed Talis' championing of the Open Data cause. As we've said before, clear, unambiguous and non-restrictive conditions for the use and reuse of data are crucial if we are to build the sort of Data Web that so many are looking forward to. That effort took a huge step forward just before the holidays as we came together with the Science Commons project of Creative Commons to announce the release of the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence.

Although generally applicable for those who wish to make data more widely available, Jennifer Zaino at semanticweb.com and others have been quick to recognise the key importance of licenses such as this one to more mainstream adoption of semantic technologies. As Jennifer concludes,

"[It] looks like the doors are about to open wide. Let’s see what the upper- and lower-case (S or s)emantic web can make of it."

The Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence is available for download from the www.opendatacommons.org site, along with the first set of documented Community Norms. Why not take a look, consider its fitness for your purposes, and get in touch to talk about ways in which you might see the licence being used?

Notes from Behind the Curtain: Opening Up

At Talis we like to do things differently. For example, whereas many companies keep the details of their development a secret we like to be very open and transparent. Lots of companies might say they're open, but how many of them discuss the intimate details of their defects in public with the users of their products? We do, and we find it makes for better relationships with our customers.

As you might expect we use the Internet to enable these discussions. In fact, we use a technology that's even older than the World Wide Web. IRC (Internet Relay Chat), invented almost 20 years ago in Finland, is a protocol designed for group chats, much as MSN Messenger and AIM are designed for one to one instant messaging. Like the Web it isn't controlled by any single organisation but consists of over 800 seperate networks that host many millions of group discussions every day.

We run an IRC discussion channel called #talis that is open for anyone to join. Usually there are about 30 people in the channel of which about 20 are Talis staff, mostly our developers. Anyone can drop in and chat at any time. If they have a technical question then there's a very good chance that one of our developers will respond with an answer. This immediacy would be hard to achieve any other way.

As another example, every morning the Platform development team hold an online meeting in our IRC channel. We call this meeting a scrum because it involves all of us getting together into a huddle at the same time. It's an opportunity for each person to update the others on the previous day's progress, plans for the coming day and anything that's holding them up. Doing it online lets us get together even when we're working remotely. However, even when we're together in the same office we conduct the meeting in the IRC channel. We do this so that other people, both within Talis and outside, can see what progress we've made and what we're planning to focus on that day.

We also use the channel for general discussions between teams and all the other kinds of conversation that happen in any office. Being online it lets us involve our remote workers and also anyone who happens to be passing by. This is all part of our open culture. We aren't a software factory, churning out code 9 to 5, but a social organisation made up of smart people. Most companies keep their developers locked away, we like ours to talk to our customers and users and hear the problems they are trying to solve first hand. We think this can only make our software better.

Why not come and join us in #talis, and make up your own mind?

Semantic Web Podcast news

Two new podcasts escaped from the backlog in the past couple of weeks. In the first I spoke with Troy Lane Williams, CEO of stealth semantic technology start-up PeoplePad. We discussed Troy's previous position at Questia, exploring the business model and vision that saw a company working with publishers to digitise print publications in the years before Google began their digitisation effort, before turning to PeoplePad and the opportunity to offer consumer-facing applications built upon Semantic Web technologies and approaches. This week, it was joined by my conversation with Eyal Oren, who has just completed his Ph.D at that well-known centre of Semantic Web research, DERI Galway in Ireland.

We'll be releasing a podcast each week over the next month or so, and as usual they'll be blogged on Nodalities as they are published, and then added to the catalogue.

We're always looking for new topics, so if you have a topic to discuss or someone you'd really like to hear please do get in touch.

The 'Internet Inside' and Semantic Technologies

I had a short piece in December's issue of SemanticReport. In 'Moving the Internet Inside with Semantic Technologies', I attempted to explore the idea that the majority of even Web 2.0 applications owe their underlying design principles to a time when distributed network resources were considered an adjunct to the application itself, rather than an integral part of it and the way that it works.

"Inside the enterprise, the Internet remains at a remove from the applications within which most employees spend their time. Valid concerns around security are certainly a factor here, as are the long lead times required to develop and implement new systems. More serious, though, is an apparent lack of vision. Rather than fundamentally re-engineering with what Tim O’Reilly refers to as ‘the Internet Inside,’ new applications continue to repeat the methods and mindset of the past. The capabilities of the network Cloud beyond the corporate firewall remain woefully underused, their potential unrealised."

I go on to suggest that, with the Semantic Web, we have an opportunity to conceptualise and deploy applications that truly embrace the network, treating a globally distributed and unambiguously referenceable set of resources in much the way that more traditional applications considered content explicitly loaded within themselves.

What do you think? Get in touch, and share your thoughts.

Cool URIs for the Semantic Web

Back in 1998, Tim Berners-Lee published a note on hypertext style called Cool URIs don't change. This highlighted the importance of persistent identifiers in Web architecture, and offered practical strategies for authors and publishers when minting URIs.

Now, a decade later, the Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group (SWEO) have just released a document Cool URIs for the Semantic Web. This describes the new issues raised around URIs when used for putting Linked Data on the Web, and again offers strategies for developers dealing with these new challenges. The document is currently at Working Draft status, and comments are requested by 21 January, to be integrated into a final document at the end of the Group’s charter.

Talis have been particularly active in this field, and are represented in the SWEO group by Ian Davis and Danny Ayers, with Danny being a contributor to the new document.

Why not read the document, and share your views ahead of the 21 January deadline?

Web 2.0 Prototyping on the Talis Platform

This month Paul asked me to nudge someone in the N-Squared community for some material about what they are doing on the Platform. Unfortunately I left it a bit late, and things have been quiet due to the Christmas break. So I thought I'd see about filling the slot myself. Coincidentally, I'd just seen a blog post from Jeff Jarvis: @twitcrit: instareviews, in which he describes something he's set up to allow mini reviews to be posted on Twitter. Basically if any followers of the Twitter 'user' twitcrit sends them a private message (by including "@twitcrit" in their post), it'll show up on twitcrit's page. Jeff was looking to aggregate these posts, so I thought I'd have a go using the Talis Platform. I wasn't after anything particularly sophisticated, just proof of concept. Another motivation was that I'm a maintainer of the RDF Review Vocabulary, and I thought it'd be interesting to see how easily these pieces of real-world data (well, squarely in the realms of Web 2.0) could be brought onto the Semantic Web. It turned out to straightforward, though rather fiddly, and in total I probably spent about a day creating a twitcrit aggregator including a plain display, together with SPARQL and search facilities. I have to confess probably a third of that time was spent referring to the Python Tutorial (I'm not exactly fluent), and another third struggling with Python's XML libraries, which made me swear profusely.

So anyway, you can find the source code and further details of this application, together with information on the Talis Platform developer community, over on the [N2] wiki.

Going from idea to live prototype in a day seems pretty good to me. The vast majority of the work was related to the foibles of Twitter data, I didn't have to worry about the store and query side of the application, the Platform store (plus boilerplate access code) took care of that. While this prototype implementation is a hack, and may fail tomorrow, the data it produces is perfectly good, reusable linked data. Before going any further I'd need to write a test harness and then fortify my Python. But if I have time I'll extend the setup a little to consume hReview data, and maybe hook it up somehow to Tom Heath's award-winning revyu.com, which is the definitive Web 2.0 application using Semantic Web technologies in the review domain.

If you would like a Talis Platform account so you too can prototype like this, please mail me.

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