The Talis Platform is an environment for building next generation applications and services based on Semantic Web technologies.

Delivered as SaaS (Software as a Service), the Platform provides an efficient and robust infrastructure that allows developers to easily store, index, search and augment data.

As well as supporting the storage and querying of RDF-based semantic content, the Platform can also store unstructured data, including binary content such as images. All features of the Platform are accessible through a simple RESTful API.

See also the Frequently Asked Questions and the main Talis Platform website

Core Features

The following list highlights some of the core features of the Platform. Refer to the API Documentation for the full list of features and capabilities.

• Store, update, backup, and manage RDF data
• Query RDF data using SPARQL
• Store unstructured content, e.g. binary blobs
• Automatically extract metadata from unstructured content
• Perform full-text search and faceted browsing across RDF data
• Augment RSS 1.0 feeds with metadata from Platform Stores
• Provide access control and authentication to limit who may read from, and write to, Platform stores

The Basic Model

The data in the Platform is partitioned into multiple stores. Each store is owned by one or more administrators who define the access control policy for the stores. The Platform is therefore inherently a "multi-tenant" system, providing scalable data storage and management facilities for a number of different users.

Each store in the Platform consists of two "boxes": the Contentbox which contains the unstructured data and/or binary blobs, and the Metabox which contains the structured, RDF data.

The metadata stored in the Metabox can be anything that the user wants to store. It may be application specific data, open data aggregated from the web, or it may be metadata related to the contents of the Contentbox, e.g. publication or image metadata. The Metabox is implemented as an RDF triple store and so manages metadata as a graph of triples.

The contents of the Contentbox is similarly flexible. It may contain key application content, e.g. images or documents; or assets such as javascript, css, images. 

The Platform allows querying of the Metabox directly using Sparql or store-specific full text indexes.