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Most of the work we do creates data, whether intentionally through study or as a by-product of normal business. With advances in storage and computing, and web-based services available to even the smallest of businesses; collection and storage of data becomes increasingly cheaper: there is a lot of data around. Easily available storage does not address the need to put data to use. We collect, store and keep ever increasing volumes of data. But instead of the valuable asset it can be, data is locked away -- imprisoned in obscure formats or exclusive databases.

Using this data is difficult, and tools designed to work with one kind of data cannot work with another. In order to unlock this value, data must be portable, accessible, and connected. The Talis platform links this data with the web, allowing for a completely different kind of data storage and usage. Publishing data to the Platform frees it from the cells of data silos and unlocks potential for reuse and discovery, both within an organisation and with the rest of the web.

Any organisation can be a data publisher. In short, the Talis Platform allows data owners to:

Unlock the value inherent in data by hosting it within a rich environment that draws out new forms of reuse
Explore the potential to license data assets to authorised developers, creating new value and revenue
Take advantage of Talis's Connected Commons to publish data onto the web for free 1
Scale their data hosting—storing a wide range of content types and metadata
Enable application developers to access hosted data through a rich and developing set of APIs

Linked Data Ecosystem

Over the last 10 years, most organisations have discovered the benefits of having an online presence for their content. No one would now imagine removing all the information from a corporate website and making the information available only to those who request it using the right form! Yet this is exactly the state of data. By joining the linked data ecosystem, your data is able to connect anywhere within the web.

By doing away entirely with the notion of a relational database, linking data works like a global, interconnected database. This makes it much easier to share your data with the outside world or even other parts of your organisation. This also means that software development can take place with any data, allowing for portable, useful data being unlocked for its potential uses.

These potentials become even more powerful when linked. Not only can you use your data more effectively, but so can anyone with whom you choose to share. Innovators, software developers, and organisations looking for information are all parts of this ecosystem. Your data might be much more useful outside your present network, and the best developers for your particular project may never have had access to your information. The Platform brings all these players together.

Specific Solutions

The Platform can be used in a number of ways to support the publishing, sharing and reuse of linked data. The following sections highlight several example scenarios with pointers to relevant case studies and whitepapers.

As An Application Engine

The Platform provides a flexible, evolving SaaS-based data storage solution that is capable of holding the increasingly varied range of data types essential to building any modern web application. Able to hold both structured and unstructured data, and offering a range of data access and query services on those stored assets, the Talis Platform can serve as a key component—the application engine—in your application.

Talis is already using the Platform as the means to not only re-engineer a number of its existing services, but also as the basis for creating new products. Outside the Platform division, the Talis Platform is already being used to power a number of next generation library management and education applications. Talis has found the flexibility inherent in the RDF data model to be a good match for agile development models. The availability "out of the box" of a scalable data and content store, an easily configurable search engine, and easy integration into web frameworks means that the Platform allows an agile development team to quickly focus on the value-added features without the need to reinvent the wheel.

For more information, there is a case study at the W3C which describes how Talis has used the Platform to create a next-generation resource management solution for the education sector.

As A Linked Data Services and Scaling Facility

As the Linked Data web continues to develop, it is becoming clear that in addition to the ability to easily access raw data, application developers need that data to be wrapped in a richer set of services allowing it to be more easily queried and manipulated. Also important is that access to linked data needs to scale as its usage grows amongst the web development community.

For organizations already publishing Linked Data, the Platform can be used as a secondary data repository that addresses both of these needs. By allowing data to be multi-homed, i.e. to be exposed directly from your web site as RDF or RDFa, and via the Talis Platform you allow developers to make use of the additional range of services offered by the Platform, including a SPARQL endpoint.

Those same services can of course be used to create additional features that can enrich the original website, allowing the data publisher to directly improve their existing services as well as providing a Platform upon which others can innovate.

As A Data Dissemination Platform

There is growing demand for organizations to open up additional metadata assets. However, for many organizations investing in the creation of new infrastructure to support this new demand can be prohibitive: investment in the technology and access to the relevant expertise may be difficult for many companies to justify, particularly as the level of usage of the data may not be clear. How can companies experiment with publishing and sharing data assets with the minimum of initial investment?

By populating a Talis Platform Store with the metadata assets that they want to publish, organizations can take advantage of the ready made infrastructure and services that the Platform provides. With costs based on a utility model, so you only pay for the data hosting and services that you use, the Platform provides an affordable way to experiment with data publishing. Through its reliance on key technical standards, the Platform allows data to be easily integrated into a range of different applications and the Linked Data web as a whole. With an access control layer providing the ability to limit data accesses to specific individuals, the Platform also offers a potential new stream of revenue based around data licensing.

Read more in our white papers, Blue Oceans and Enabling the Linked Data Ecosystem.

Talis is also able to provide consultancy and support to help carry out the conversion of data sets from relational databases and other sources into RDF suitable for publishing via the Platform.