Here at Talis, we’re passionate about the web, open standards and Linked Data, to name but a few. This passion has manifested itself as evangelism at conferences and through our own blogging and publications. Everything you’d expect from a company that seriously believes in shared innovation.

Where we’ve been a little more cautious is around the promotion of the Talis Platform, our own semantic web offering. The Platform has been in service for several years now supporting our own product development and innovation but, while we’ve been happy to discuss its features, and to provide developers with access to the Platform for research and prototyping, we’ve been holding off from discussing the commercial aspects of the Platform. There have been several reasons for this.

Firstly there’s the usual story around engineering and product development. This is a continual process, but there milestones that we felt we had to achieve. These vary from the small — improvements to the general consistency of the API, for example — through to some larger architectural changes. For example, yesterday saw our 23rd monthly Platform release which provided us with a much faster and more scaleable SPARQL endpoint. Existing stores will be gradually and seamlessly transitioned to the new infrastructure and we’ll be capitalizing on these changes over the next few releases to make some additional improvements.

Secondly, and perhaps more fundamentally, we’ve been taking our time over developing our own understanding of how the Linked Data ecosystem is evolving, the infrastructure required to support that ecosystem, and where we can best provide support to help promote shared innovation around the emerging linked data web.

Lastly, we’ve also been deciding how much we can give away for free! Last month we announced the Talis Connected Commons scheme which provides completely free Platform hosting for public domain datasets. This is a fantastic offer that provides for unlimited use of the Platform for datasets up to 50 million triples. That’s a lot of space to capture some really interesting data. Aside from that we’re also committed to ensuring that some aspects of the Platform API, such as the free text search, augmentation, and linked data access will also remain freely available, regardless of the terms of the data hosting.

We refreshed the Platform website yesterday to provide more information on this and other aspects of the service. For example there’s now a high level overview for developers, some discussion of how the Platform can be put to good use, and a short FAQ that address some common questions.

As the licensing page notes, we’re now offering to host data in the Platform on a commercial basis. The pricing is based on a utility model, so you pay for the amount of storage and service usage you make. We’re currently working on finalising the terms and conditions and service level agreement around the Platform so that we can share these publically too: this is another area that we want to take our time and make sure we get things right.

Over the next week or so I hope to post some more information about how the Platform is already being used, as well as discussing some of the exciting commercial projects we have underway.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in signing up for the Connected Commons, want developer access, or want to discuss commercial uses of the Platform further, then please get in touch.