Welcome to Talis Platform News

Welcome to the third issue of Talis Platform News. The last month or so has been a period for recharging batteries, for catching up, and for consolidating upon progress made earlier in the year. Here at Talis, the Platform team has been no exception, but we'll have plenty of news to share with you over the next few months.

In this issue, we have some updates to previous items on our Platform Advisory Group and on licensing of Open Data. We've tracked the progress of W3C's GRDDL specification in each issue of Platform News, so it was great to see GRDDL achieve 'Recommendation' status (the closest W3C has to a 'standard') this month.

Finally, Danny Ayers offers some insight into the arcane process by which he assembles Nodalities for This Week's Semantic Web each week.

The list of those to be found chattering on #talis seems to grow every day, so do stop by and join in the conversation.

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

Licensing to ensure that data participates in the Web of Data

One obstacle to the widespread use and reuse of existing data on the Web of Data is the complex way in which rights over those data are implied, inferred, and (often incorrectly) attributed.

It is possible - but not always politic - to simply give data away, lodging it in the public domain. At the other extreme, it is all-too-easy to lock data up behind firewalls, passwords, and draconian non-disclosure agreements and licenses.

For many people there is a clear desire for a middle ground, somewhere between free for all and access denied. In the area of creative works, Creative Commons does a great job of filling this void, and some have attempted to apply those copyright-based licenses to data, too.

Talis took a different approach with the Talis Community License, drawing upon European Database Law to craft a license that permitted - and actively encouraged - the use and reuse of data whilst protecting certain rights for the contributor.

We're just coming to the end of a process in which we engaged the legal brains of Jordan Hatcher and Charlotte Waelde to evolve that license into something that would stand up here in Europe, but also in jurisdictions (such as the United States) where database law does not apply.

Their latest draft is available on Jordan's blog, and there's been some great coverage there, on Nodalities and on various lists. I've even seen people remarking that the license might be "the answer to their prayers". Praise indeed!

Take a look, and contribute your own thoughts on where it meets your needs and where (if at all) it doesn't. We'll be finishing the text over the next few weeks, and then moving it to a new and permanent home where the license can take on an identity of its own.

Talis Platform Advisory Group

Eight great individuals from around the world, each bringing a very different perspective and set of experiences, are joining with Developers and the Management team from Talis in frank and open discussion of the global trends and realities to which the Talis Platform is our considered reaction.

The Semantic Web, Web 3.0, the Web of Data, Collective Intelligence, Hyperdata. Whatever you want to call it, a remarkable number of technologies, attitudes, external trends and serendipitous opportunities are coming together in ways that presage a truly disruptive step change in the extent to which John Battelle's Database of Intentions can be made manifest.

We're not driving toward 'one true ontology', we're not expecting everyone on the Web to start crafting RDF, and we're not peddling philosophically pure yet abstract models as somehow 'better' than the pragmatic approaches currently taken to the construction of social (and) other networks. Rather, we are creating opportunities whereby existing data, existing behaviours, and existing connections can be made far more powerful. Inference, association, context, and role come into play, delivering a richer and more intuitive way to express oneself and one's desires, and to make existing investments and existing data work far harder to realise their full potential.

You'll be hearing a lot more of this over the coming months, but a white paper from earlier this year should provide a good taster for now, and Talis Platform News keeps subscribers aware of the latest news each month.

I am truly delighted that such a knowledgeable group have agreed to give up some small portion of their time to push back against our ideas, to share their perspectives, and to work with us in growing this still-nascent market to the benefit of us all.

Today's members are;

Dan Brickley, Mills Davis, Alan Dix, Stefan Decker, Nova Spivack, Susie Stephens, Jamie Taylor,and Jon Udell.

I'm still in discussion with some other potential participants, and anyone else who thinks they should be at the table is welcome to get in touch.

Does the Semantic Web interest Venture Capital?

It has been fascinating to watch the emergence of Semantic Technologies into the mainstream. We've seen the Semantic Web in the laboratory for years, but it's finally moving toward mainstream adoption, as illustrated by the recent flurry of 'semantic' companies and the growing interest of those with money. In this recent podcast, Brad Feld shares some of his views on these trends, and offers some predictions on where we'll see movement next.

This podcast is one of a series, available here.

GRDDL Specification becomes W3C 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.

Assembling This Week's Semantic Web

Ian was curious how I put together "This Week's Semantic Web". In short, it's a haphazard exercise involving lots of page skimming and copy & pasting. I collect from a variety of relatively focused sources, and filter according to what feels right. Although I take advantage of various Web 2.0 systems, I'm sure a significant proportion of the activity could be further automated, given the right tools. I imagine some human intervention would always be required, but right now an awful lot of time is spent manually integrating data which appears in different forms.

First I fire up Amaya, the W3C's browser/editor, and open a HTML document I use as a template for the layout. At some point I must prepare a CSS file containing classnames corresponding to those of the popular microformats (plus a few extra terms using eRDF), with this in place Amaya's could act as quite a nice embedded-data editor.

Next, in my usual browser Firefox I go to a bookmarks folder I have called Daily, which I "Open in Tabs". This is my usual portal onto the web, as the name suggests I use it on a daily basis. The general process now is to hunt for relevant material in each tab, then copy and paste a link into Amaya, adding (or copying) a short summary as I go along.

The first tab is the Gmail inbox, which is where my mailing list subscriptions go - but I don't actually use this at compilation time. Although I filter things to folders, they're not very well organised, and usually I'll have already bookmarked (one way or another) anything of interest that's floated by. There are quite a lot of Semantic Web-related mailing lists, most of the key ones corresponding to the W3C groups. Although I try and follow all the discussions in real time, I also double-check the archives of the Semantic Web Interest Group list (semantic-web@w3c.org) which as a public group features a wide variety of announcements. I'll skim through the titles, opening anything that looks of interest in a new Firefox tab. I'll also check the W3C homepage in case there's any bit of news I've missed.

The next tab is the Bloglines feed aggregator. Like the mailing lists I keep an eye on this during the week (and it's disorganised), but will double-check the Semantic Web related feeds in my subscriptions for any new material.

The juiciest tab is usually Planet RDF, the aggregated blog posts of a couple of dozen Semantic Web-oriented bloggers. If there have been a lot of posts in the week, I have to check this in Bloglines for the earlier posts.

Another goldmine is the Semantic Web Interest Group scratchpad, to which folks on the #swig irc channel (on irc.freenode.net) post links. Only a small proportion of the links are really news, and relevance varies wildly - often seriously technical, but it's usually interesting material. I'll go back through the week's archives, opening links in a new tab and then chopping the tabs down as I copy & paste into Amaya.

I use the del.icio.us online bookmarking tool quite a lot during the week, and if I see something that might be relevant I'll bookmark it, adding the tag "weekly". Some of the other members of the Semantic Web Education and Outreach group also use del.icio,us, so it's also worth check items tagged "sweo". (One day I intend to try out some of the other social link/meme-watching tools like Reddit and Digg, but don't feel any urgency, already got quite an information overload).

Most of the other tabs in Daily are link or blog aggregators, ranging from fairly general news to Semantic Web-specific material. Three of the items are just for status-checking my own blog (which is often down). A couple of links are in there for entertainment, a couple are social network style applications, Twitter and Facebook - I'm afraid neither of which I pay attention too, beyond a quick glance.

After I've trawled through the Daily tabs, I usually have a dozen or so extra tabs containing pages that might be of interest, again I copy & paste to Amaya where it seems appropriate, and close the tab.

Once all the Firefox tabs are closed, I make sure the Amaya document's been saved and open it using the emacs text editor in nxml-mode. This does offer an extra check that the markup is valid, but it's simple practicality really - source code selection in Amaya doesn't work very well. Finally I copy the contents of the document's <body> into a new entry in the MovableType blogging tool, and post it.

Daily

Gmail - personal mail, mailing list subscriptions

Bloglines | My Feeds - feed aggregator (my subscriptions)

Planet RDF - aggregated feeds from Semantic Web bloggers

del.icio.us/popular - items bookmarked by a lot of people, some good technical material appears

danja's bookmarks on del.icio.us - my personal bookmarks

tech.memeorandum - popular stories in the blogosphere, tends to be hype-oriented

Planet Web 2.0 - aggregated feed from Web 2.0 bloggers

Planet XMLhack - aggregated weblogs from XML bloggers

Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Scratchpad - annotated links posted from IRC chat latest - SWIG IRC logs

Hot Links - technically-oriented links

Planet Swhack - aggregated feeds for members of the

Swhack Cultural Forum (swhack on IRC)

Feed Validator Results: http://dannyayers.com/feed/rdf/ - check on my personal blog's feed

Result for http://dannyayers.com/ - W3C Markup Validator - check on my personal blog's homepage

RecentChanges - ESW Wiki - the Semantic Web Wiki

Achewood - surreal cartoon humour

Raw - my own blog, another check

Planet Intertwingly - aggregated feeds from bloggers chosen by Sam Ruby, an excellent resource for cutting-edge coding tech Twitter - microblog chat/trivia

Facebook | Home - social network site

Nodalities - Talis group blog

n2-dev | Google Groups - Talis Platform developer community mailing list

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