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The Platform is for Data...

Modern business is driven by data, by what we know and what we do with that knowledge. The Talis Platform brings a networked approach to data, connecting information and surfacing new possibilities at the joins. It provides a hosting and development infrastructure for data owners and publishers, as well as software developers. It handles both structured and unstructured data and provides a reliable and scaleable solution for data hosting. But the Talis Platform does more than just store data. It brings together data publishers and developers in an environment designed to produce possibilities.

The Talis Platform is delivered Software as a Service (SaaS) providing reliable access to stored data via the Talis API. Talis uses the Platform to drive its own market-leading applications, bringing 40 years of software heritage to the bleeding edge of web development.

Data in the Platform

Data held in the Platform is organised into “stores” which can be individually secured if need be. Any kind of content can be added to a store along with arbitrary RDF metadata. The content and metadata becomes immediately accessible over the Web and discoverable using both SPARQL and a free text search system with built in ranking of results according to relevance to the search terms. RDF provides a powerful and flexible data model which encourages linking and sharing of data and dramatically reduces the complexity of data integration.

Because each store provides a uniform API regardless of the type of data it holds, the Talis Platform gives unparalleled opportunities for reuse and remixing of data. The uniform Web API allows applications to easily search multiple stores of data, and the use of RDF enables the application to interpret and use the results with very little effort. This means that developers using the Talis Platform benefit immediately from an ecosystem of data and services that enable rapid development of applications with a strategy to continually evolve and improve them as they incorporate new types and sources of data.

For more information on Platform solutions for data owners and publishers, please see our Solutions section.

Developers can find more information on the Talis API and other queries in our Developers area.