A short while ago, my colleague Zach Beauvais podcasted with the Vice President of Engineering at Talis Inc., David Wood. In this conversation, David discusses his background, Linked Data and SPARQL. He also talks about Talis Inc.s’ first US customer: the US Government Printing Office (GPO) and its Persistent URL infrastructure, which provides persistent Web addresses for critical government documents and is primarily used by the more than 1,200 Federal Depository Libraries. The PURL server uses the PURLz open source software, the development of which was led by David while at Zepheira, and complements the data hosting and search capabilities of the Talis Platform with identifier management functionality.

For more information, you can follow David on Twitter on read his blog.

The opening conference keynote presentation this year comes from Dion Hinchcliffe, Senior Vice President of Dachis Group.  Dion is an internationally recognized business strategist and enterprise architect with an extensive track record of building enterprise solutions and strategies for clients in the Fortune 500, federal government, and Internet start-up community.

In this conversation we explore the impact of web and social technologies and their impact, challenge, and opportunity when applied to the enterprise.

In this Nodalities Podcast, I speak with Jay Myers from Best Buy about how he and his team are working within the retail giant to better harness their data. Jay tells us about his use of blogs and RDFa to better manage “open-box” products returned to Best Buy’s many stores in an effort to surface deals to the public and make savings on otherwise costly problems.

Jay also explains how Best Buy are publishing the machine-readable data out on the public web and touches on the next steps Best Buy will be taking. He also calls on the Semantic Web community to take an active role in promoting work like this by voting for his panel at South by Southwest, which you can see here.

Jay Myers is a Lead Web Development Engineer for Best Buy, and is an active supporter of the GoodRelations vocabulary for ecommerce, utilizing it for modeling consumer products, stores, and services in both RDF/XML and RDFa. For more information, you can read his blog or catch him on Twitter.

My guests on this Talking with Talis podcast are Wernher Behrendt  and John Pereira of Salzburg Research.  They are part of the team behind IKS – The Interactive Knowledge Stack an Integrating Project part-funded by the European Commission.

The four year project started in January 2009 to provide an open source technology platform for semantically enhanced content management systems.  The concept behind it being, that once developed, the stack can be bolted-on to many different CMS products to add semantic, and semantic web, capabilities.  Even though the project is open source, and the obvious use of it is with open source CMS tools, it’s use could be of equal value to commercial products.

Their target is engage with 40 small to medium organisations for whom developing such capability would not be possible with their limited resources.  They are already well on the way, with many joining in via the project Web site and participating at the first early adopters workshop in Salzburg in June.

I spoke with the Guardian’s Simon Rogers, editor of the Data Blog, about their decision to publish thousands of facts from the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary. In this podcast, Simon introduces Wikileaks and its use by journalists, an reiterates the Guardian’s strategy of publishing raw data alongside stories and comment. During the conversation, Simon explained his perspective on publishing these leaked data and what people can do with it, pointing out that the Guardian doesn’t put any restrictions on reuse of the facts.

One of the major applications of these raw data, especially anything containing geographical information, is the ability to visualise them. One of the first things the Guardian produced from the leaked data was an interactive map of Improvised Explosive Device incedents affecting troops and civilians.

The opening up of the data behind such applications could prove to be a powerful catalyst for wider visualisation and applications built around the presence of authoritative journalistic facts. Putting the raw data in the hands of the web’s hackers has been a bold move from the Guardian, and I hope to see new and better stories come from the tools made possible by a supply of useful information.

Tom Steinberg of mySociety fame joins me on this Talking with Talis podcast to discus the approach to open and linked data in the context of the UK Government.

We talk about his role over the years; the emergence data.gov.uk as part of the previous administration’s Making Public Data Public initiative; and the subtle change of emphasis accompanying the new administrations name change to the Transparency Programme.

Finally we move on to the role of the newly formed Public Sector Transparency Board of which he is a member.

We’ve covered the launch of Facebook’s Open Graph protocol in Nodalities Magazine, discussing its potential impact on Linked Data. So, I invited David Recordon—Facebook’s Senior Open Programs Manager—to talk with Talis about Facebook and the Open Graph Protocol. We ended up talking all about the protocol, how developers can make use of it (and why), as well as touching on Facebook’s view of social networking as a graph.

The Open Graph Protocol page has information about the protocol itself. Facebook’s f8 developers’ conference site also has links with more information for developers.

This year, Talis sponsored the final Scripting for the Semantic Web challenge at the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC). The winners of the challenge were Alexandre Passant and Pablo Mendes for their sparqlPUSH project. sparqlPUSH brings an element of real-time to working with Linked Data. Instead of needing to poll for new data periodically, sparqlPUSH works alongside PubSubHubbub to effectively push data out to where you need it. I spoke with Alex Passant at the conference about the challenge, real-time data, and sparqlPUSH. Alex also wrote about the scripting challenge on his blog.

Opening up data in the scientific community is something that’s become increasingly important, and getting the licensing and rights in order is a matter of urgent attention. With more and more researchers needing more and more data, there is an increased need for there to be clear information on what can be done with which data.

I spoke with LSE Research Fellow Dr. Prodromos (Pro) Tsiavos, who is researching open licensing, data sharing and publishing data in the public sector and who is also a Legal Project Lead for Creative Commons England and Wales. Pro’s main focus has been with the Cultural commons, and we discussed culture-shifts in science, and how the expectation that data are shared and licensed changes the way research may be done in future.

Following on from our podcast conversation with Richard Stirling, Head of Making Public Data Public and data.gov.uk, – based out of the Cabinet Office of the UK Government, in which he explained about the challenges of launching of data.gov.uk, we were asked if it was possible to look behind the scenes at what had been implemented.  Zach Beauvais, and the Talis video camera, were invited in to the Cabinet Office so that Richard could do just that.

Richard walks us through the data.gov.uk site, explaining how data is stored, an accessed.  He explains the [very open] licensing conditions surrounding the data.   It has been well publicised that they have made a commitment to delivering an increasing proportion of that data as Linked Data.  Richard explains the reasoning and benefits of doing that in addition to publishing it in it’s initial raw form.

We get a sneak preview of a new Linked Data API, which will soon provide a simple way to query  data in that form, without the need to understand the SPARQL query language.