Welcome to Talis Platform News

Welcome to the second issue of Talis Platform News. As Ian Davis outlined last month, we intend for this to be a means of sharing information about what we are doing under the hood - and what all of you are doing to put that infrastructure to use.

It's been great to see some of our readers already taking the plunge and joining in the chatter with our Development team on Talis' IRC channel on freenode, #talis. Everyone's welcome, so if you have queries, proposals, or just fancy a chat, come on in.

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.

Paul Miller, Editor

Talis Platform Advisory Group

Here at Talis we have spent the past couple of years investing significantly in the organisational and technological change required to deliver a robust and modern technology Platform capable of global reach. Soundly based upon Semantic Web, 'Web 2.0’ and existing Internet technologies, a set of open RESTful APIs, and a fundamental rethinking of the value and ownership of data, Talis' Platform enables innovative applications that learn from and assist their user to be created by any software developer. Some of the rationale behind the decisions made to date is outlined in a recent Talis white paper.

We've been working on the Platform for a while and are very pleased, both by our technical progress and by our ability to engage with and attract respected members of the community such as Danny Ayers to share the journey with us.

As we reach the point at which large chunks of the Platform begin to see the light of day outside our offices, it's time to further validate our ideas with leading practitioners across the sector, and to ensure early engagement with their perceptions of change.

We have the Early Access Developer Programme that Danny Ayers discusses in this issue, and are also taking steps to establish a high level Advisory Group. Members of this group will share ideas and experiences around the trends and realities of delivering Semantic Technologies at web scale, and we're delighted to announce the first set of names for the group. These are; Mills Davis, DERI Director Stefan Decker, Radar Networks' CEO Nova Spivack, W3C SWEO Chair Susie Stephens, Metaweb's Jamie Taylor, Microsoft's Jon Udell.

Watch out for the announcement of further names, and some details on the first tasks to which the group turns its collective attention.

Open Data Licensing, Revisited

Last month, in a piece on 'Open and Linked Data', I referred to some of the recent discussion around licensing for open data.

Since then, discussion on- and off-line has continued. Chris Rusbridge of the UK's Digital Curation Centre entered the debate, offering some thoughts on potential risks with simply throwing data out on the web for all comers. Talis' Rob Styles followed up on his WWW2007 presentation with a longer thought-piece, and we continued to talk with potential partners and beneficiaries to ensure that work to formalise our Talis Community License for more general use was proceeding along the right lines.

Just as Creative Commons does for 'creative works', the current draft license is intended to provide a middle ground for those wishing to openly license their data. As Rob Styles remarks of the current situation;

"And therein lies the rub. Without appropriate protection of intellectual property we have only two extreme positions available: locked down with passwords and other technical means; or wide open and in the public-domain. Polarising the possibilities for data into these two extremes makes opening up an all or nothing decision for the creator of a database."

We have now begun some work to validate the current license, and to ensure that its protections can be extended to a wide

range of legal jurisdictions prior to renaming and relaunching it for the wider community. There will be more news on progress, and on the team with which we are working on this, in subsequent newsletters.

As recent discussion around Facebook has highlighted, moves to provide Open Data licenses are one part of a larger problem; that of changing business models and practices in order to support a more open approach to exchange.


As ever, if you're interested in participating please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Folksonomies are more powerful - and more complex - than they first appear

On the surface, the humble folksonomy appears a simple thing. A user finds some resource of interest and applies a number of simple words or phrases in order to describe it sufficiently to enable their subsequent recall. Sites such as del.icio.us are excellent examples of this use case.

In a recent podcast with Infocloud Solutions' Thomas Vander Wal, though, the true potential behind these user-generated descriptions becomes clear, as do the issues that still need to be addressed in realising the folksonomy's potential.

Talis Platform Early Access Developer Programme

The Talis Platform will soon be able to support a large number of diverse applications, each potentially with a huge number of users. While many aspects of the utility, stability and scalability of the Platform can be exercised by applications developed in-house, the real test will come when the doors are opened to developers at large. In addition to the purely technical aspects of the Platform, developers will also need suitable documentation, tutorial material, demo code and so on.

But even solid technology and support material is not enough to enable the kind of potential something like the Talis Platform has to offer. It's clear from developments in the world of Open Source software and various Web 2.0 systems that to thrive in the current interconnected environment, it's important to build and maintain a community of developers and users. With technology that is genuinely at the leading edge, this becomes crucial.

As a first step towards fulfilling these requirements, Talis is launching an Early Access programme for developers. To bootstrap a community, a fairly small number of Web developers have been identified, and in the very near future will be given access to Platform facilities. These developers have three particular characteristics in common: they are already working with Semantic Web technologies, they are highly self-motivated and they are active in the Semantic Web community.

Although these particular individuals have been hand-picked, anyone with the enthusiasm to start developing on the Platform at this early stage will be welcomed. The Early Access developer's brief is simple: build what you like. The Platform is domain-neutral, so applications are entirely determined by their imagination. It won't be easy in the first few months, documentation is still fairly minimal (though new material is already appearing on the Wiki every day). This is one very good reason for encouraging a community spirit!

As well as being a warm-up exercise for the Platform software, the Early Access programme will also act as a testing ground to determine the most appropriate means of communication amongst Platform developers. While tools that have been known to work elsewhere such as a Wiki, mailing list, IRC channel and code repository will be available, it is anticipated that the community will find its own best modes of interaction. With openness and agility as core principles of development at Talis, it will be interesting to see where the community leads.

GRDDL Specification becomes W3C Proposed Recommendation

wc3 logo

The purpose of GRDDL is to allow data contained in HTML and XML documents to be transparently interpreted as RDF, in other words making those documents first-class information on the Semantic Web, in many cases without any extra effort from the document author.

GRDDL is described in a suite of documents:

Talis' Ian Davis and Danny Ayers are both members of the W3C GRDDL Working Group with Ian acting as an editor of the Primer. Danny has prepared a GRDDL Quick Reference [PDF] card.

Talis believes that GRDDL represents one of the most important steps along the road to the Semantic Web. It provides a very simple yet extraordinarily powerful mechanism to uplift documents into the web of data. Talis intends to fully support GRDDL in our Semantic Web Platform, allowing our customers to automatically extract searchable RDF metadata from their existing content with very little effort.

"This Week's Semantic Web" updates now appearing on Nodalities blog

The Semantic Web community has grown to the extent that it's extremely difficult to keep track of significant developments in the field. With this in mind Danny Ayers has started a regular column on the Nodalities blog in which he draws on a wide range of sources to provide selected links to new documents, software and upcoming events. So far three posts have appeared: for the weeks ending 22nd July , 29th July and 5th August 2007.

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