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September 2009

Traditionally a slow month, August certainly didn't seem that slow around the Platform! Here is a roundup of what's been happening. As always, if you have any questions or would like to try your hand at developing on the Platform, please do get in touch.

Zach Beauvais

Platform Evangelist, Talis

twitter/skype zbeauvais

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

Talis Plaform News - September 2009

Linked Data: an important Meetup

Talis sponsored the first Linked Data London meetup, which took place on the 9th of September and saw hundreds of Linked Data enthusiasts, developers, geeks and civil servants in attendance. Sir Tim Berners-Lee took part in a panel discussion chaired by Carol Tullo from OPSI, and Leigh Dodds (Talis' Programme Manager for the Platform) took part in a discussion on the future of journalism. The evening was rounded off by Talis' Tom Heath who presented a talk on the future of Linked Data.

VoCamp Bristol

Leigh also attended the VoCamp in Bristol on 10th and 11th September which was co-organised by Tom Heath. Leigh worked with others on a vocabulary for recipes, and Tom has been compiling one for PostCodes. "VoCamp is a series of informal events where people can spend some dedicated time creating lightweight vocabularies/ontologies for the Semantic Web/Web of Data." If you'd like to attend, there is a list of upcoming VoCamps on the VoCamp wiki.

Latest Platform Release

The Platform's monthly release is now at 27, with release notes available on the n2 wiki. There is also a Platform development Google Group for regular community updates. Release 27 includes performance improvements made to the Reindex Store Job. As an example, running a Reindex Job on a Store containing 30 million triples would have taken several days. This should now complete in around 3 hours. 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 - Periodicals

Data Incubator hosts a Linked Data view of many periodicals. This journal and publications metadata can be found via dataincubator.org with the sparql endpoint here. If you 'd like more information on how to use this data, please get in touch, and I can point you at some of our tutorials or sign you up for developer access to the Platform.

From the Blogs and Podcasts

Zach's Nodalities Magazine article is also available on Nodalities Blog here.

This last month has been a busy one for podcasts! We've spoken with David James of Sunlight Foundation about government transparency; Thanassis Tiropanis from the University of Southampton about the Semantic Web and Higher Education; and with William Tunstall-Pedoe, CEO of TrueKnowledge.

Nodalities Magazine

The most recent edition of Nodalities Magazine hit desks this last month, and we've had great feedback from the articles so far. This edition will be available in conference bags at the ISWC2009 in Washington DC, but if you can't wait until then, you can have a look on the site and subscribe for future editions. If you would like to tell your Semantic Web or data-related story, please get in touch with Zach on zach.beauvais@talis.com with your idea. You can also follow Nodalities (@nodalities) on twitter.

Platform Webinars

Talis is hosting it's first Platform webinar on Thursday, 24th September at 15:00 (GMT). Ian Davis will be presenting his work on ProductDB (a Linked-Data view on ProductWiki), and there will be opportunity to ask questions and learn about developing on this dataset. On Thursday, 22nd October, we will be hosting a second webinar with Jeni Tennison presenting some of her data.

For the webinar in September:

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

  • Title: Talis Platform Datasets
  • Date: Thursday, September 24, 2009
  • Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM BST

For the webinar in October:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/638956184

  • Title: Talis Platform Datasets
  • Date: Thursday, October 22, 2009
  • Time: 1:30 PM - 2:30 AM 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