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3 December 2007
Engage - with Semantic Web
Posted by Richard Wallis at December 3, 2007 12:35 AM
We at Talis have been showing what is possible with the Talis Platform for a while now, and talking about it for even longer.
A Platform for Talis and others to simply build powerful applications upon, that has Semantic Web Technologies at its core - I have been heard to say on more than one occasion. I have also on several occasions complained at the difficulty in trying to demonstrate this power. The analogy I often use being that of demonstrating a new automobile engine to the general public - if you just show them an engine on a chassis, they won't be very impressed - if you put it in a nice looking car they will start discussing the body colour and the look of the alloy wheels.
Well let me point you at Talis Engage. The software equivalent of that nice coloured car with a great set of alloys - and under the hood? - you've guessed it 'The Talis Platform'.
Talis Engage is not a 'concept car', it is a real product in the process of being implemented by several UK Local Councils. Engage builds on the tradition of Community Information software to become a tool to foster community engagement.
Take a look around the demo engage tenancy and you will find a nice looking product with an inbuilt taxonomy viewable as a word cloud or in a more traditional form. Dated records are made available in calendar form. Using a record like this one as a starting point, it is possible to navigate, via the Historical Buildings subject to another building, Sarehole Mill to the associated Person record for John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. As a demo tenancy its a bit light on data, but its worth a wander around to see the other record types and relationships within it.
So OK, a nice set of alloys, but what is different about a Talis Engage tenancy? Firstly that word 'tenancy' - the Software-as-a-service equivalent of purchasing a software product to install on hardware on your site, or allocated in a hosting centre. Users of Engage are using Storage in the Talis Platform alongside the other Engage tenancies and other applications such as say Talis Cenote.
One of the nice spin-off benefits of the architecture behind Engage is the ease of management of the system, allowing the creation of many record types and relationships suited to the particular use of the system and not any preconceived ideas of our application development team. If you have a few moments to spare, take a watch of the video by Ian Corns (linked from the Engage Web site) showing how easy it is to create the record types that you would need.
This is all great, but where is the semantic web stuff? - As the Future proof posting on the Talis Engage Blog tells us
The schematics under Engage takes advantage of the ontology and themes of the W3C submission Semantically Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC). It uses Friend of a Friend (FOAF) to describe contacts and Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) to describe taxonomies such as the IPSV (an ESD standard).
Engage its self is a thin application layer, built on top of the Platform which is doing all the underlying searching, indexing, and semantic relationship between records.
Engage is one of the first commercial applications utilising Semantic Web technologies at its core - no surprise then that Richard MacManus highlighted the Talis Platform as one of 10 Semantic Apps to Watch, in a recent Read/WriteWeb posting.
Technorati Tags: Talis Engage, Talis Platform, Talis, Comunity Engagement, Semantic Web
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Tracked on December 3, 2007 09:37 AM
