Platform Banner

If you'd like to be kept up date on Platform happenings each month, please sign up for Talis Platform News.

August 2009

Greetings from the tail-end of summer here at Talis. We've been very happy with the feedback Talis Platform News has received, and look forward to any suggestions, feedback or Platform news of your own - feel free to get in touch.

Zach Beauvais

Platform Evangelist, Talis

twitter/skype: zbeauvais zach.beauvais@talis.com(email, MSN and GTalk)

Talis Platform Webinar

Reserve your Webinar seat now at:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/679542313

Talis is hosting its first Platform webinar, where we will be exploring datasets and hacks made possible by the Talis Platform.

Date: Thursday, September 24, 2009
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM BST

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

System Requirements:

PC-based attendees

Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista

Macintosh®-based attendees

Required: Mac OS® X 10.4 (Tiger®) or newer

Guardian Hack Data on the Platform

Leigh Dodds and Ian Davis were invited to present at the second Guardian Hack Day last month. At the event, Leigh and some fellow hackers from the BBC's /programmes and /music data projects put together a visualisation of Guardian political data based on the Platform. You can watch a demo screencast Leigh put together here.

ProductDB

ProductDB contains information on over 20,000 products including prices, images, alternate names, categorisations, reviews, pros and cons and links. We crawl ProductWiki pages and convert the information to Linked Data, making it available via productdb.org and a Talis Platform store http://api.talis.com/stores/productdb

Latest Platform Release

Release 26 is now live, and notes available on the n2 wiki. Release 26 includes several internal updates and a number of non-functional upgrades. This release is mainly focused on these internal areas as part of our ongoing enhancements to performance, scaling and features and so there are fewer API issues resolved in this deployment. The n2 wiki holds general info on releases and their schedules, and from there you can subscribe to the release calendar in iCal format. There is also a Platform release Google Group.

Featured Dataset - Guardian Hack Data

This month's featured Dataset is the one used at the Guardian Hack Day for the visualisation mashup. The dataset features metadata about British Members of Parliament, relating them with their constituencies, expense returns and guardian.co.uk articles. The dataset is available via dataincubator.org here.

From the Blogs

Nodalities Blog has hosted, this month, several articles from the newly-released Nodalities Magazine. More articles will be available over the next few days, so that each can be read either in the Magazine or on the blog. Ian Davis, Talis' CTO, released his Nodalities submission about data licensing and waivers early, and you can find it in this post.

Jeni Tennison on the Talis Platform

Jeni Tennison has been blogging over on her own site about some of the work she's been doing to get data up on the Platform. There is a roundup on the Nodalities Blog here.

Linked Data and News Innovation

Leigh Dodds talks about his presentation at News Innovation in Fetter Lane last month with links to his slides. The short talk turned into an hour-long session in which topics of provenance, security, and other implications of Linked Data were discussed at length. Leigh's notes and links to his SlideShare slides can be found here.

Podcast Roundup

Paul Miller has hosted several exciting podcasts this month including the latest one in which he speaks with Jim Hendler and Li Ding about converting Data.Gov resources to RDF. Earlier, he also spoke with canadian Public Policy expert David Eaves about Open Data and Open Government in Vancouver. Also on the list was a talk with John Sheridan—head of e-services at OPSI—about eGovernment and Linked Data here in the UK. http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/category/podcast