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By making available databases of human genomic data, US census records and other data of public interest, the Amazon Public Data Sets are an incredible resource. They're like a 21st century Public Library for robots to patronize. In this emerging era of flourishing data-centric applications, though, the state of the art never stands still.

Forty year old British technology platform Talis (background) announced this week that it now offers free, perpetual storage and keyless API access to semantically marked-up large data sets. The offering is called the Talis Connected Commons and it's the kind of thing that anyone with a geekish imagination can get excited about.

This is a guest post by by Zach Beauvais.

Talis is a bit different than most web 2.0 startups we hear about. It is a 40 year-old technology company with a significant presence in the UK - nearly a quarter of British academic and public libraries make use of its software. Although the Web is a prominent feature of the organization, their primary focus is on data management.