Here at Talis we’re very pleased and excited to be announcing a new scheme that we’re calling the Talis Connected Commons.

We’ve invested a lot of time and energy over the last few years in evangelising the importance of linked open data. Along the way we’ve funded development of open data licenses to help provide the legal framework to support open data projects, and have followed our own advice and shared data with the communities surrounding our own products. And throughout this time we’ve been hard at work not only building the Talis Platform, but also using its flexibility to re-develop our own products.

We felt it was time to start bringing those two strands together and allow other people to really start using the Platform. For a while now we’ve let a number of developers have access to the platform for the purposes of prototyping and experimentation, but we recognise that for the Platform to become a serious component in the semantic web infrastructure that it needs to be offered on a more formal basis. The Talis Connected Commons scheme is the first step towards achieving this, and we think its a big one; not only for us, but also for the open data community in general.

True to our desire to see a truly open web of data, under the terms of the Connected Commons scheme Talis is offering free access to the Platform for the purposes of hosting public domain data. And the offer isn’t just limited to free hosting: the data access services, including access to a public SPARQL endpoint, are also freely available.

The terms of the offer are as follows: if you own, or are creating, a public domain dataset then you can store that data in the Platform as RDF, for free. We’re setting an initial cap of 50 million triples on each dataset, but thats should be plenty of space in which to collect some really interesting data. To qualify for the scheme, you need to be using either the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License or the recently launched Creative Commons CC0 license to publish your data. Anyone will then be able to freely access the stored data using the Platform services, without API keys and without usage limits. This means that your data will be wrapped in a ready made API right from the start.

The Platform API covers basic data management facilities, through to a configurable search engine and a fully compliant SPARQL endpoint. And with data being delivered in a range of formats including RDF/XML and JSON, there should be something there for everyone to get their teeth into no matter what kind of application you’re building or environment you’re working in.

For more information on the details of the offer visit the Connected Commons homepage. We’ve prepared a lengthy set of frequently asked questions that should hopefully clarify any other questions you might have. If not, then feel free to send in a comment and we’ll try and address your questions.