In this Talking with Talis podcast, Paul Miller talks with Semantic Web startup Metaweb's Minister of Information, Jamie Taylor. Best known for Freebase which, although only in limited alpha release, has already attracted the admiration of such commentators as Tim O'Reilly, Jon Udell, and OpenBusiness, Metaweb has the goal of 'build[ing] a better infrastructure for the Web.' Freebase's online help describes Metaweb's vision thus;

"We aspire to be the center of a new Web by being a critical piece of infrastructure for businesses, organizations and people that want to use, present and manipulate information. We've started by building a working system and a single example application. Over the next few months, we will work to demonstrate our larger vision by integrating Metaweb into other applications, websites, blogs... anywhere there is a need for structured information. Right now only a few thousand websites are 'database driven'. If we succeed, millions will be.

We will be compared to Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and other information driven sites, but such a comparison misses our real purpose: we are trying to enable thousands of organizations and millions of people to build their own Web. Paradoxically, we are decentralizing the experience of information by centralizing the storage of it."

During the conversation, they discuss Freebase, Metaweb's wider goals, and the way in which both fit within the wider notion of a Semantic - or Data - Web.

In this Talking with Talis podcast, Paul Miller talks with Amit Kothari of QuotationsBook.com.

During the conversation, they explore some of the background to QuotationsBook and touch upon Amit's plans for the future. They also address the recent Creative Commons-licensed release of QuotationsBook data in RDF, and investigate some of the risks and opportunities posed by this open approach to data sharing.

In this Talking with Talis podcast, Paul Miller talks with David Wood of Zepheira. Founder of Semantic Web database company Tucana Technologies Inc., David is more recently a founding member of the Kowari Metastore and Mulgara Semantic Store Open Source Software projects.

During the conversation, David discusses the relationship between these three well known examples of Semantic Web data management, before going on to address some of the opportunities created by building a capability to manipulate massive bodies of Semantic Web data within and between organisations.