Platform Banner

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

June 2009

We are often asked to be keep everyone up to date with developments relating to the Talis Platform, so this monthly news update is the result. I am eager to hear your feedback so please get in touch.

Zach Beauvais

Platform Evangelist, Talis

twitter/skype zbeauvais

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

BBC Backstage SPARQL Endpoint

Talis have been working with the BBC, alongside OpenLink, to provide a SPARQL endpoint for the BBC's programme and music data. We've put together some demos and are regularly crawling the site for more data to hold in the Platform. We're very excited about this project, and Leigh Dodds summed up the reasons: "I think the BBC data is the first true multi-homed collection of Linked Data."

Talis Connected Commons

In April, we launched the Talis Connected Commons programme to provide hosting and data services for publicly-available datasets. In order to remove the financial barriers entirely, we have made the Platform available for institutions and developers and have made licensing datasets easier.

Platform Expansion

We've recently undertaken some extensive maintenance on the Platform's service provision. The driving forces behind the work were expansions to capacity, improvements to the network and general upgrades to the services the Platform provides (such as the API). If you follow @talisplatform on twitter, you can be notified of work and maintenance.

Latest platform Release

The Platform is currently on release 24, with release notes available on the n2 wiki and Google Group discussion. Release 24 sees additional output formats for SPARQL Endpoints and support for relative URI's submitted to Store Metaboxes. More information about the releases and their schedules can also be found on the n2 wiki, where you can also subscribe to the release calendar in iCal format.

Featured Dataset - OpenLibrary Data

The Open Library project aims to provide a web page for every book ever published, and the Platform currently holds a sample of 191,555 records making up 6,014,174 triples. The dataset is available via Data Incubator.

Semantic Web and Enterprise

PricewaterhouseCooper's recent quarterly Technology Forecast is given over exclusively to Semantic Web and Linked Data. We discuss it on Nodalities blog here.

A Good Week for RDFa

With the unveiling of Google's RDFa support and discussions from the UK's Central Office of Information around using RDFa in their job sites, there has certainly been a lot of coverage of RDFa and Linked Data over the past few days. The post is available here.

Podcasts

Paul Miller talks with Andy Denmark, co-founder and VP for Development at TripIt, about the rise of structured data. A chat with Stephanie Lemieux, a Senior Consultant at Earley & Associates, which covers folksonomy and taxonomy in the Enterprise. A further podcast features Erik Nemeth, a Senior Data Specialist at the Getty Research Institute. It covers the place of disciplinary research databases in a Web 2.0 world. A podcast recently published on Talis' Xiphos blog may also be of interest where Paul Miller talks with John Wilbanks of Science Commons to discuss his views on Open Data and Linked Data.

Nodalities Magazine

The latest edition features tech publishing giant O'Reilly Media as its cover story—Linking Data and Semantics at O'Reilly. You can also now follow Nodalities Magazine on twitter (@nodalities) for updates on posts and suchlike.