The Talia library platform Rapidly building a digital library on Rails

Talia is a web-based distributed digital library and publishing system, designed for scholarly research in philosophy. Talia is based on semantic web technology; it’s being developed with the Ruby on Rails web framework. Rails is a relatively new environment, which allows developers to easily create well-structured web applications. By combining its power with semantic web technology and leveraging on existing solutions like ActiveRDF, it is possible to quickly create a full-featured semantic library platform, from scratch, in a short time. Talia does not aim at creating new semantic web technology as such, but at providing practical solutions for embedding the existing technology in modern web applications. This paper focuses on a few select features of Talia to show the possibilities.