In the relatively new semantic web world, at least one company has a long heritage in the field -- for forty years, U.K.-based Talis has been providing its enterprise-level library management suite to academic and public institutions, claiming one-quarter of such U.K. institutions as its clients.
The company’s drive toward the semantic web is of more recent vintage but fits with its self-described passion to create and be part of a wider set of open communities engaged in realizing the potential of shared innovation. Its Talis Platform uses semantic web technologies, advanced indexing, and fast searching to enable the management of any type of unstructured or semi-structured data for sharing, remixing, and reuse.
Semanticweb.com recently spoke with two Talis executives, technology evangelist Paul Miller and CTO Ian Davis, about the importance of open data as it relates to the semantic web, and meeting some of the challenges around that idea.
Semanticweb.com: Tell us a little about Talis’ history, and what it envisions as its future.
Miller: We are a software company with two core areas of business. The first reaches back into our heritage, which is delivering enterprise-level software for universities and government agencies. The second area of our business is focused upon building an open semantic web platform that allows others and ourselves to build new and rich applications on top of it. There are synergies between the two, we are developing our new generation of applications on our platform, and applying semantic technologies in universities and government today.
We’re building on a tradition of managing rich structured data, and by pulling in talent from across the software and technology space, bringing them in and harnessing their skills, we are building out the technology platform to enhance our own applications, but also to deliver a sound semantic web basis upon which any other business can build applications of their own.
Semanticweb.com: Is this opening opportunities beyond your traditional customer base?
Miller: Our existing customers are definitely customers of this new opportunity moving forward. … But the sorts of conversations we are having around the platform itself go beyond our traditional audience base, geographically and in terms of the things they do.
There are a lot of opportunities for the Talis Platform that are not bound by a particular sector. There are individual developers, commercial or non-commercial organizations that can build powerful semantic web applications and services on our platform. There are also organizations that require help in managing and opening up large quantities of data.
Some domains are readier for the conversation, some are more aware of the importance and potential for [managing] large bodies of data. The biggest interest and early opportunities are within market sectors that understand the value of opening data up and linking to information from other places. Some of the bigger enterprises have been far more insular in their view of data, with a greater focus on protecting data.
There’s a longer-term conversation to have there. The semantic web is useful to them, but in other ways until they get the linked data web argument. That won’t go down well with a bank at the moment. They want to protect their data, not link it.
Semanticweb.com: Speaking of opening up access to data, you recently announced the release of the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence. Tell us more about the impetus behind that and your expectations of where this will lead. (For more on this, check Open Standards for Data Formats, and Open Data.
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