Q and A with U.K.-based Talis
Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor
In the relatively new semantic web world, at least one company has a long heritage in the field — for forty years, U.K.-based Talis has been providing its enterprise-level library management suite to academic and public institutions, claiming one-quarter of such U.K. institutions as its clients.
The company’s drive toward the semantic web is of more recent vintage but fits with its self-described passion to create and be part of a wider set of open communities engaged in realizing the potential of shared innovation. Its Talis Platform uses semantic web technologies, advanced indexing, and fast searching to enable the management of any type of unstructured or semi-structured data for sharing, remixing, and reuse.
Semanticweb.com recently spoke with two Talis executives, technology evangelist Paul Miller and CTO Ian Davis, about the importance of open data as it relates to the semantic web, and meeting some of the challenges around that idea.
Semanticweb.com: Tell us a little about Talis’ history, and what it envisions as its future.
Miller: We are a software company with two core areas of business. The first reaches back into our heritage, which is delivering enterprise-level software for universities and government agencies. The second area of our business is focused upon building an open semantic web platform that allows others and ourselves to build new and rich applications on top of it. There are synergies between the two, we are developing our new generation of applications on our platform, and applying semantic technologies in universities and government today.
We’re building on a tradition of managing rich structured data, and by pulling in talent from across the software and technology space, bringing them in and harnessing their skills, we are building out the technology platform to enhance our own applications, but also to deliver a sound semantic web basis upon which any other business can build applications of their own.
Semanticweb.com: Is this opening opportunities beyond your traditional customer base?
Miller: Our existing customers are definitely customers of this new opportunity moving forward. … But the sorts of conversations we are having around the platform itself go beyond our traditional audience base, geographically and in terms of the things they do.
There are a lot of opportunities for the Talis Platform that are not bound by a particular sector. There are individual developers, commercial or non-commercial organizations that can build powerful semantic web applications and services on our platform. There are also organizations that require help in managing and opening up large quantities of data.
Some domains are readier for the conversation, some are more aware of the importance and potential for [managing] large bodies of data. The biggest interest and early opportunities are within market sectors that understand the value of opening data up and linking to information from other places. Some of the bigger enterprises have been far more insular in their view of data, with a greater focus on protecting data.
There’s a longer-term conversation to have there. The semantic web is useful to them, but in other ways until they get the linked data web argument. That won’t go down well with a bank at the moment. They want to protect their data, not link it.
Semanticweb.com: Speaking of opening up access to data, you recently announced the release of the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence. Tell us more about the impetus behind that and your expectations of where this will lead. (For more on this, check Open Standards for Data Formats, and Open Data.
Miller: There was a real recognition from ourselves and a number of others that the traditional business models around data — traditional organizations whose reasons for existence was to collect large bodies of data, hold it and charge for access to it– their time has passed, perhaps. The assumption was that the data is the thing that’s valuable. Increasingly we recognize that what is valuable are the services delivered to end users that are driven by that data, rather than the data itself. Amazon recommendations make more sense if they are open and exposed, because the volume of data is larger and richer. You can innovate more on top of a larger pool of available data. But it’s not enough to just expose the data and put it out there; you need clarity around how you use it.
Business models need to change. We need to move from models of scarcity and control to models of ubiquity. Reliable, cheap and speedy access to data and computational resources via the Internet allows us to fundamentally rethink the relationship between corporations and ‘their’ data. The industry needs to stop thinking about how big the database is and start thinking about how to deliver value on top of that data. This will take a while, but it’s the sort of notion upon which a truly successful semantic web must surely be predicated.
There are pros and cons to opening up data. The downside is that the traditional business model won’t work anymore. But a large number of opportunities are opened up. Are you prepared to take those downsides to get the upsides?
In order for the industry to change and make data reusable in more ways, we set about creating a license to remove uncertainty, risk and confusion. The industry needed a way to explicitly say how data can be reused. People and organizations need to know they have the right to use different data. Data holders also need to understand the environment into which their data will be released.
We were pleased to team up with Creative Commons to release the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License. To draft the license, we worked with Jordan Hatcher and Dr. Charlotte Waelde who ensured its fitness of international purpose whilst also aligning it to the phrasing of Creative Commons’ overarching protocol.
Semanticweb.com: How does the license take out some of that uncertainty and risk?
Miller: Firstly, there’s a confused picture around the difference between data and creative work. You have to be clear that a basic fact is freely available, not covered by copyright or those kids of protections. That is the basic premise upon which all then builds. In terms of copyright, it is reasonably well understood. Often organizations fear losing all of their rights over data and therefore default to offering no rights. Whereas organizations such as Creative Commons provide a middle ground, where there are certain things that you, as copyright owner, want to permit me to do without having to ask you first. So you might say, reproduce my work if you acknowledge that I wrote it. But with data, those kinds of things haven’t been as clear, partly because of the different views of how data is protected. In Europe we have notions of Database Rights here, which the US explicitly doesn’t recognize for various reasons.
A different approach is therefore required if we are to facilitate the widespread availability of data, upon which the emerging Semantic Web will depend. The license harmonizes the rights across different territories, by asking contributors to explicitly waive all those rights first.
This is enhanced by a set of ‘community norms’. Essentially there is an expectation that you behave in the way the community says it wants the data to be treated. There is no recourse to a court. But domains will be fiercely policed by the community, and [abusers] will be ostracized fast enough. Take the scientific community. An annoyed scientist is probably worse than any judge.
Davis: It leads to credibility, as well. The principle of citation between works lends credibility to your work. People follow through the problems of where data comes from and where you derived your conclusions. That’s about reputation and standing in the community. It works the same way for data released into the community pool. You want to understand problems, methods for collecting that data, policies for revising and improving it.
We are trying to build a web of data, but we really mean a web of usable data, that you have the right to use, that you can incorporate it. It is not enough to just expose that data and put it out there, you need instruments around how you can use it.
Semanticweb.com: How significant is increasing data openness to Talis and its business?
Davis: Ultimately the success of the Talis Platform is predicated on having large amounts of data available for applications to use, to remix, to deliver to their ultimate customers. The more data there is, the greater the chance people will want to use the Talis Platform to manage that. To be commercially successful we have to make the platform successful. This requires trust in us as a business. Open data licensing is one way to achieve that. It’s important to realize we don’t want to own the data in the platform. It is our customers’ data, open or closed. We provide facilities around that to make the best use of the Semantic Web.
Semanticweb.com: What interest have you seen so far in this license?
Miller: There’s a lot of interest. We talk to our peers a lot about these issues and a number of other large holders of data in the semantic web space are looking very closely at the license with a view to understanding how it works for them and their current models. We’re also seeing people beyond the semantic web space — those managing large bodies of data, like Open Street Map — whether these kinds of protections let them fulfill their mission. [Open Street Map has created a free editable map of the entire world.] They want the data out there and being used and re-used, and they want some license to do it.
Certainly for the semantic web, if it ever gets out of niche applications in research projects in universities or niche applications of a corporate intranet, some clear protections and clear mechanisms for exposing explicitly open data is the missing piece. Without it the rest is an interesting academic exercise.
What we didn’t want is for this to be our license. If it is to succeed the community has to adopt it, take it to its heart and continue to carry it forward. We are in the process of gifting the work that’s already been done on the license to the wider community. And we are working with the Open Knowledge Foundation in Cambridge in the U.K. as a possible long term home for the license. We are also working with a number of other partners to jointly agree to fund its ongoing development and any other licenses that may come out of it. We don’t want this to be just ‘our’ thing. We want others to collectively own it and we are very keen to continue to help it move forward.
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Contributor
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