Leigh Dodds has drafted a diagram illustrating relationships between resources in an effort to understand and describe Dataset and API discovery in Linked Data. He writes, “While there’s been lots of research done on finding and using (semantic) web services I’m initially interested in supporting the kind of bootstrapping use cases covered by Autodiscovery. We can characterise that use case as helping to answer the following kinds of questions: Given a resource URI, how can I find out which dataset it is from? Given a dataset URI, how can I find out which resources it contains and which APIs might let me interact with it? Given a domain on the web, how can I find out whether it exposes some machine-readable data? Where is the SPARQL endpoint for this dataset?” Read more

In a series of statements over the weekend, Leigh Dodds, who has served as CTO of both Talis Systems (part of Talis Group) and of spin-off data marketplace Kasabi, announced that the company is closing their consulting business and winding down the two-year old Kasabi. This news is not surprising, perhaps, to industry insiders who have watched in recent months as several key members of the leadership team have left the organization. The Talis education group and product, Talis Aspire, will continue.

While noting some of the many successes they have had over the years, Dodds acknowledged “…there is a limit to how much one small organisation can achieve. In our view, the commercial realities for Linked Data technologies and skills whilst growing is still doing so at a very slow rate, too slow for us to sustain our current levels of investment.”

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Leigh Dodds has posted a paper regarding layered data and RDF. Dodds introduces the paper thus: “Two years ago I wrote a short paper about ‘layering’ data but for various reasons never got round to putting it online. The paper tried to capture some of my thinking at the time about the opportunities and approaches for publishing and aggregating data on the web. I’ve finally got around to uploading it and you can read it here. I’ve made a couple of minor tweaks in a few places but I think it stands up well, even given the recent pace of change around data publishing and re-use. I still think the abstraction that it describes is not only useful but necessary to take us forward on the next wave of data publishing.” Read more

Leigh Dodds, CTO of Kasabi and a past SemTechBiz speaker, recently wrote an article proclaiming the open data revolution. Dodds writes, “Open data is now mainstream. Spurred on by the US and UK governments vying over who could be the most open, there are now open data activities in many regions around the globe. Under the ‘Government as Platform’ rubric, you can find the public sector exploring social media, conducting experiments in citizen engagement and crowd-sourcing, and casting a spotlight on their own activities through various transparency initiatives. Almost all of those initiatives are being driven by the demand for and publishing of open data.” Read more

Paul Miller recently had a conversation with Kasabi CTO Leigh Dodds. According to Miller, “Kasabi sees its role very much as an enabler of aggregation. Rather than focusing, as some data markets do, on simply providing access to data sets, Kasabi is betting on the power of being able to combine and recombine data in compelling new ways. Hidden under the hood, Talis’ platform technology leverages the potential of the Semantic Web to make these connections possible.” Read more

What got Talis going on its Linked Data marketplace that launched in public beta in June, dubbed Kasabi? The recognition that there had to be a business model in making RDF data as easy to use as possible – from publishing it to querying it, all in a well-supported and sustainable fashion for providers and consumers alike.

“We felt we had a good understanding of the challenges people faced taking their first steps with publishing Linked Data, and also with development communities trying to use that data in their applications,” says Leigh Dodds, the product lead for Kasabi and program manager for the Talis Platform, a role that led him to become quite familiar with what organizations face in hosting and publishing Semantic Web data. “We wanted to make it simpler and easier for both sides, so we began looking at a marketplace environment.”

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Kasabi, Talis’s linked data marketplace is now in public beta. Leigh Dodds, who will be presenting Kasabi at SemTech, wrote on the project blog, “This morning we’ve rolled out a new openly accessible version of the site which is at beta.kasabi.com. As a key milestone for the public beta, we’ve added the ability to create and publish your own datasets. Any registered user can now create and publish new datasets and APIs. Signing up to use an API on any dataset is a really simple click-through process.” Read more

Talis will be on hand at next week’s Semantic Technology Conference to present their latest semantic web application, Kasabi – a Linked Data Marketplace. According to Talis, “Kasabi is a new web application that aims to support organisations in the publishing and monetization of data on the web. The benefits of ready access to high quality data sets to support the creation of innovative new web and mobile applications is well-documented, and there is growing demand from developers for new data sources.” Read more

Last week, the Second Linked Data Meetup London was held at the University of London Union. There were several compelling presentations discussed on Twitter  including the BBC’s use of Linked Data for their Wildlife Finder app. One of the many promising topics to emerge from the day was the introduction of a new Linked Data API. While there have been other Linked Data APIs (Pubby and irON), this API has the more narrow goal of lowering the bar for non-SemWeb developers to access these rich data collections. It is intended as a simple RESTful layer that returns JSON representations of RDF collections backed by a SPARQL endpoint. The API was primarily developed by Dave Reynolds, Jeni Tennison and Leigh Dodds. At the "How the Web of Data Will Be Won" talk by Jeni Tennison and John Sheridan, they emphasized that extending their successes on exposing government data in a linked fashion will require a focus on usability to attract new developers.

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