Tag Archives: Talis

Ian Davis presents the Talis Platform at KMI

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My colleague, Ian Davis, visited the Knowledge Media Institute yesterday to present his talk on The Talis Platform: A Generic Infrastructure for the Next Generation of Web Applications to their research group. Here’s the short synopsis for the talk:

The Talis Platform provides a generic infrastructure for building data-rich Web and Semantic Web applications. By taking care of the “heavy lifting” associated with data management and storage, developers are freed up to concentrate on building applications using the Platform’s APIs and services. In this presentation I will outline the problems the Platform is attempting to solve, describe the principles on which our approach is based, and ground these in trends such as “Software as a Service”. The capabilities of the Platform will be illustrated through demos of Platform services for mashing up heterogeneous data and providing faceted querying over data sets. I’ll wrap up the talk by describing how members of the audience can use the Platform to support their own applications, and help shape its future development.

Ian is a great guy, and is very much the driving force behind our vision for what the platform should be. The talk is only thirty minutes long but he gives a valuable insight into what we are doing and hopefully what we are trying to achieve. If your interested in finding out about what we do and why we are doing it then watch the talk.

Cool Bash One-Liner: Post files to Platform Store

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As part of some small prototyping activity I had to convert a whole load of data into rdf. My problem was that the files I had generated were scattered around in a very hierarchical directory structure, but all I wanted to do was find them and most them to a platform store. I really didn’t want to have to post them one at time manually. I knew I could do it using a bash script but my scripting was a bit rusty … so I asked Rob, he showed me how to do this …

  1. span class=”st0″>"*-issue.xml.rdf"‘s!^\./\([0-9]*-issue.xml.rdf\)!curl -v -d @\1  -H content-type:application/rdf+xml http://api.talis.com/stores/kiyanwang-dev1/meta!’

Cool, huh? 🙂

For the un-initiated, the find locates all the files I want to post which in my case ended with -issue.xml.rdf. The sed search and replace matches the filename, and then replaces it with a curl command, inserting the filename as a parameter @\1. Finally the generated curl command is piped to bash which executes each generated line.
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Tom Heath Joins Talis

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2008 is going to be a very exciting year for our development group at Talis. We have a number of interesting projects that we are working on in addition to extending and improving our Platform technologies – to that end I think it’s great that Tom Heath has joined us as a researcher. For those who don’t know him, Tom is one of the people behind Revyu.com, which won the 2007 Semantic Web Challenge. I’ve been an admirer of Tom’s work since first meeting him last year and I genuinely think he brings a great deal of expertise on recommendation systems to the team. I’ve spent a few days working with him last week on some R&D work we are doing and what strikes me about Tom is firstly that he is great fun to work with, and secondly that he is extremely passionate about his areas of interest. I’m really looking forward to working more closely with him and learning a lot from him.

I’ve gone Mac

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It’s been a busy month for a number of different reasons – mostly I’m still trying to come to terms with the death of my father – I’m not entirely sure if burying myself in work is the best way of dealing with it but so far it seems to be working, everyone @ Talis has been really supportive and the current R&D project I’m working on with a small team has helped me to totally immerse myself in a single problem and that’s made it easier to deal with things … plus what were working on is very innovative and so it feels really rewarding at the moment.

Anyway, as the heading of this post suggests I’ve gone Mac! and I love it!! When I returned to work this year I had a shiny new 17″ Mac Book Pro waiting for me. I have never used a Mac before I’ve always been firmly entrenched in the PC world, and for most of my development needs I would often run flavours of Linux inside of VM’s. The problem with this though is Windows has a host sucks and there’s only so many VM crashes I can put up with. Many of my colleagues chose to go down the route of wiping Windows off their laptops and installing Ubuntu. I seriously considered doing this but was convinced, primarily, by Rob and Chris and pairing with them or watching them do development work on their Mac Book Pro’s that Mac’s are a great alternative.

I spend a lot of time inside a terminal window and with Mac you have a fully featured bash shell which makes a huge difference in terms of productivity, on Window’s to get anywhere close I had to run CYGWin, or work in a Linux VM, … anyone who thinks that the Windows Command Shell is comparable needs to seriously seek help!

I spent a fair bit of time getting development tools installed and getting used to how different Mac OS X is to Windows or anything else I have used. So far Leopard has been a pleasure to use there’s been the odd quirk now and again, but nothing worth mentioning. Rob published a wonderful list of tool’s he installed on his Mac, which I basically used as a check list to get up and running. To his list I’d like to add the following:

CCMenu 1.0
Displays the project status of CruiseControl continuous integration servers as an item in the Mac OS X menu bar.

Lab Tick
Have you ever been annoyed by the fact that you could not turn on your PowerBook or MacBook Pro’s keyboard illumination in daylight? If so, here’s your solution. Lab Tick gives you total control over the backlit keyboard.

iComic Life
Only really started using this recently, but it’s a wonderful tool for quickly storyboarding scenario’s as Comic Strips. If you do choose to you this you might also want to download this set of stock images produced b Sun’s User Experience Team.

BatchResize’em all 1.1
A great little tool for quickly resizing a batch of images.

Dock DR
Wonderful little utility for customising your dock on Leopard.

There’s lots more which I’ll post up from time to time. If there’s one thing I do miss though, its Windows LiveWriter, which for offline blog editing was a wonderful tool and sadly isn’t available on the Mac. Instead I’m using Ecto which is good but nowhere near as simple to use or nice as LiveWriter was. Sad isn’t it? That’s honestly the only thing I miss … after spending the last few weeks developing on my Mac I don’t think I will ever go back to a Windows based machine.

Talis and Creative Commons launch new Open Data licence

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Yesterday we, at Talis, announced some wonderful news – Talis has been working in partnership with the Science Commons project of Creative Commons and we are all pleased to announce the release  of the new Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence.

As an organisation Talis have been interested in the licensing issues surrounding Open Data for quite some time now, we’ve been talking about Open Data at conferences and also writing about many of these issues. In 2006 we began this process by launching our own attempt at an Open Data licence called the Talis Community Licence – this helped to shape some of our initial thoughts. Earlier this year we even convened a special workshop on Open Data at the World Wide Web conference in Banff which helped us to understand the direction we wanted to move in and who we needed to work with to make this a reality.

This new licence represents a real milestone for us. For the Semantic Web to succeed there needs to be more data coming online marked up for linking and sharing in this web of data, hopefully the licence can serve as a tool that enables more of us to share and contribute data.

YouTube adds Visual Browser

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Click to enlarge

YouTube have added a cool visual browser that allows you to find videos that are related to the one you are watching. In order to access the feature view a video, then go full screen. You’ll notice a new icon next to the play button ( represented by three dots) if you click on this and the Visual Browser appears. It shows you videos related the current node in the center. If you click on any related video more nodes appear representing further related videos. As an exploratory interface it’s really simple and intuitive to use and uses a similar metaphor to an interface I’ve been working on at Talis for exploring data that is structured semantically.

For a while now I’ve believed that discovery is more important than search, if you think about it traditional searches that ask users to enter keywords don’t use context which is why they are so hit and miss – relevance rankings are based on external influences and nothing to do with you as an individual what’s worse is it’s never clear to the user why the results that do appear are there – we have to accept the relevance or ranking system because we are never told why.

A discovery tool like the Visual Browser pictured above helps us to see how things are related and in doing so provides us with context – it also gives us a sense of control because we choose how we explore and find things of interest … that’s empowerment.

Lecturing – Usability and Web2.0

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Alan Dix I had a lot of fun yesterday, my good friend Alan invited me to come up to Lancaster to do a special guest lecture on Usability and Web2.0 – I was asked to talk about the demands Web2.0 put on real world development, and the usability issues we now face. The lecture was intended mainly for his undergraduates but he invited the MSc, MRes and PHD students to attend as well.

I must confess I was very nervous it’s been a long time since I’ve had to stand up and talk for ninety minutes – I had also spent much of the weekend trying to prepare my slides and work out how to I was going to talk, intelligently, on a subject area that encompasses so much. I have to thank Richard Wallis and Rob Styles, two of my friends at Talis who both provided me with some great advice last week when I approached them and said “arrghhhh I’m panicking!I know what I want to say I’m not sure how to structure it“, fortunately they both gave me some great advice so I spent the weekend trying to organise my thoughts.

In the end it was fine, I really enjoyed the session and Alan did his best not to embarrass me ( too much 😉 ). I started by talking a little bit about the Web1.0 and the sorts of usability mistakes  that were common back then ( and perhaps still are now ), I went on to talk about the differences between Web1.0 and Web2.0. I then focused on Web2.0 and the kinds of usability problems that we are having to consider and find solutions to at the moment and tried to cover broad range – technology, accessibility, identity, authority, privacy etc. I also talked about Search as a usability problem, and how we still can’t find what were looking for, I explained why this leads me to believe that Google is broken. This flowed nicely into the final part of my talk which focused on the semantic web and some of the work we’re doing at Talis.

The slides for my presentation are now available online here.