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.

Last week I listened to a talk by Shane Hipps, a Porsche “consumer anthropologist” turned Mennonite minister. The speaker, clearly aware of the contradictory nature of his background, made a very interesting observation about the digital age. He essentially said that we are, as a society, experiencing a shift of great magnitude in history which reflects one of the greatest changes humanity has ever experienced: literacy.

Moving from an oral tradition to a literate society—in which letters allow people to commit their thoughts to memory—fundamentally changed the way society and individuals thought. It freed individuals to think on their own without having to commit their ideas to the collective memory of their tribe. It also changed the ability of the social groups to sense the emotional state of its individuals, because they could now exist in an abstract, individual mindset.

So, agrarian societies relied on the community to remember and structure their ideas. The result of this community conceptual framework was an empathic connection between members of the community. Writing, on the other hand, allows individuals to remove themselves from the older framework and commit their thoughts to paper resulting in a loss or shift in the empathy of the culture or society. In a digital age, however, there is a new shift: one of removal to connection at a distance.

This concept: empathy at a distance or a digitally-connected community, made me consider the connections in the Semantic Web. The in’s and out’s of the SemWeb have been argued, discussed, debated, and explored technologically. Many blogs and sites have huge amounts of content devoted to the definitions of SPARQL and RDF. Abstractions have been published discussing the applications of this new technology. Sir Tim Berners-Lee refers to the Semantic Web as ‘The Web done right.’

But, what is being done right? Is the Semantic Web the Web done technologically right? Is it an upgrade to the existing framework or a patch to fix what was wrong? Maybe. But it makes me wonder about looking at this from a sociological or communicative perspective. The Semantic Web, technologically, is important to humanity only so far as it’s a medium for our connections.

So, when we make new semantic connections, and the software is increasingly able to associate us with concepts, people, items and communities (like academic institutions or or organisations); what is actually happening? People are making connections, and committing them not only to their own memories but to a community.

Publishing, you might argue, has been around since not that long after the first scribblings of meaning. But, publishing is one-way and narrow. A message or idea is only committed to the memories and added to the mental repertories of those who actually read the message. The same is true in a digital age (with multi-channels for ‘reading’ such as podcasts and video also) but the distinct difference is the access to concepts and the ease of utilising or ‘consuming’ the material. Firstly, digital goods are infinitely (in practice if not in absolute purist terms) copyable. There is no limit to the number of times you can copy and distribute an electronic text or a podcast so society does not have to wait for an idea to filter through because your dad hasn’t finished their Times crossword. Secondly, the connections made digitally (and more semantically-enriched) are increasingly collaborative. With software doing the heavy lifting in terms of data mining and content distribution, more ideas get to more people in more accessible ways.

Finally, although the Semantic Web is far from complete in application, the glimmers it allows us to see could have huge sociological implications. It’s the human element of the Semantic Web which makes it so exciting and so potentially disruptive. It’s possible that people, finding and synthesising ideas before feeding back their individual perspectives into the community, are increasingly able to connect with people and concepts in a more empathic way; without losing the abstract and logical abilities of the literate age.

Is this a new age? Undoubtedly. What will it look like? I’d say: like you and me—people.

Image: “karstadt connection” by rastafabi from Flickr—Creative Commons

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-05-06, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

A little later and shorter than usual this week due to public holiday and rsi…normal service will be resumed next week.

In the Media

• Podcast: Christine Connors talks about semantic technologies at Dow Jones
• Podcast: Semantic Gang on Wikipedia for Data
• Podcast: Talking about WWW2008 on the BBC
• Podcast: 15th anniversary of CERN releasing the World Wide Web code for free
• Video: Chris Messina talks about his project DiSo
• Maling list: public-rdf-ruby@w3.org
• Class: Semantic Web 2.0 and Semantic HTML

Docs

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 – Candidate Recommendation
• A Survey of Current Approaches for Mapping of Relational Databases to RDF
• Opening and closing like flowers (social platform roundupathon)
• Walled gardens: mapping the parties
• In Perpetual Pursuit of Context
• Perspective Applications
• Digg makes official its adoption of a ‘semantic Web’ standard
• Sir Tim Berners-Lee addresses WWW2008 in Beijing
• Microformats test-suite concept
• London Gazette to use RDFa
• On Sem Web Search
• Linked Data enters state of Evoluation
• Linked Data Trip Report – Part 1, WWW 2008, Linked Data and Information Architecture, SPARQL at WWW 2008, WWW 2008 reports on Twitter
• XTech Talks covering Linked Data
• Semantic Web talks in Innsbruck
• Understanding Model-View-Controller

Software News

• SPARQLBot – “Your Semantic Web Command Line”
• SPARQLScript
• Building a Web 3.0 Address Book, The So(m)mer Address Book (aka Beatnik) – now available via Java WebStart, and showing at JavaOne
• Piglet – “a small RDF triple store written in C++”
• RDFohloh – RDF wrapper of Ohloh, open source directory, details
• Sonivis – social network/wiki analysis tool
• Distributed Twitter Client in 20 lines of code [it's a Ruby Jabber client]
• XBRL Ontology group, first cut XBRL to RDF
• Ad hoc plumbing
• VRM with FOAF + OpenID
• DOLCE-UltraLite – upper ontology, OWL DL
• GraphPath – “a little-language for analysing graph-structured data, especially RDF”

Events etc.

• Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF at XTech 2008
• Support for US students attending ISWC 2008
• 1st Social Data on the Web workshop (SDoW2008)
• Semantic Web Interest Group f2f meeting proposal (in France, during week of Oct 20-24 2008)
• CFP Semantic Web Challenge and Billion Triples tracks
• See also : Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants

Miscellany

• freeourdata.org.uk
• Rapping About Proper HTML
• Adobe Opens the FLV and SWF Formats
• Web Inspired Terrestrial Radio
• Please yo-yo the rrm
• Restarter martyr: sounds of Firefox 3b5

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags “semweb weekly” – thanks!