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July 2009

Following such positive feedback from last month's launch of Platform News, we're delighted to continue to keep you up to date with monthly Talis Platform happenings. If you have any suggestions, feedback or Platform news of your own, please get in touch.

Zach Beauvais

Platform Evangelist, Talis

twitter/skype: zbeauvais

zach.beauvais@talis.com(email, MSN and GTalk)

Talis Aspire: An Honourable Mention

Chris Clarke, Programme Manager for Talis Education, received an honourable mention for the paper he recently presented to the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC). The paper outlines the use of Semantic Technology for managing and publishing Linked Data in students' resource manager, Talis Aspire (talis.com/aspire).

BBC Platform Demo

Leigh Dodds, Programme Manager for the Talis Platform, recently recorded this screencast in which he shows how the BBC's /programmes and /music sites make use of rich RDF data, as well as giving a demo of a simple mashup of user reviews using SPARQL and the Talis Platform. The BBC and Talis want this to be a basis for more mashups, and if you've got an idea, get in touch.

Conference Tour

From Crete to Dagstuhl, this past month has seen guest speakers, panel members, paper submissions and a fair deal of travel for intrepid Talisians. Tom Heath, Researcher for Talis, gave a quick roundup on the Nodalities blog.

Latest Platform Release

The Platform's monthly release is now at 25, with release notes available on the n2 wiki. There is also a Platform release Google Group. Release 25 includes upgrades to a number of internal dependencies. These upgrades have themselves resolved a small number of issues but also unblock upcoming functionality which can now be added over the following releases. The n2 wiki holds general info on releases and their schedules, and from there you can subscribe to the release calendar in iCal format.

Featured Dataset - NASA

It's been 40 years since the first human walked on the moon, and we've chosen an ever-expanding dataset to celebrate. Hosted on dataincubator.org, the NASA dataset currently includes information on all space craft listed by NASA. Some data are also being linked to BBC programmes by Linked Data. If you have an interest and would like to contribute, please feel free to get in touch and let us know how you've made use of this dataset (or others), and we'll try to include links to mashups.

From the Blogs

Interesting Semantic Web Stuff

Tom Scott's guest post rounds up some of the recent exciting happenings in Semantic Web and Linked Data. The post was guest published on the Nodalities blog here.

Britain 2.5

Zach Beauvais continues his theme on open and public data with a look at Britain's digital future following the Digital Britain report. His latest blog post is up on Nodalities.

Podcast Roundup

Paul Miller talks with Tom Gruber, CTO and co-founder of Siri, about whole notion of the "Virtual Personal Assistant". Mark Birbeck also had a chat about the role of RDFa in the UK Government's Central Office of Information, and Slovene startup man and CEO of Intrix Davorin Gabrovec talks about Semantic Technologies and Enterprise 2.0 here.

Nodalities Magazine

The next edition of Nodalities will be hitting desks by August, with content blogged shortly before. As a sneak preview to Talis Platform News subscribers, we can say that Nodalities Magazine 7 will feature the Guardian, amongst other content from the Semantic Web and Linked Data spaces. As always, you can follow Nodalities Magazine on twitter (@nodalities) for updates on posts and suchlike, and can email ideas and submissions to the editor at zach.beauvais@talis.com.