Open Calais

Paving the way to web 3.0

Connecting everything is no small job but Calais wants to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and thereby, far more valuable as well. Also known as Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph, they call thier piece of it Calais. What it does sounds simple – what you do with it could be nothing short of absolutely amazing.

So what the heck is Calais anyway? Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, the Calais Web Service automatically creates rich semantic metadata for the content you submit – in well under a second, Calais analyzes your document and finds the entities within it and goes goes well beyond classic entity identification returning facts and events hidden within your text. This metadata gives you the ability to build maps (or graphs or networks) linking documents to people to companies to places to products to events to geographies to…well, whatever logical object you can construct. You can use those maps to improve your sites navigation, provide contextual syndication sources, tag and organize your content, create finely structured folksonomies, filter and de-duplicate news feeds, or analyze content as shown below.

Presently major focus areas of the Calais initiative are delivering the tools with which to build great applications and fostering a community of developers that will make those applications happen. The web service is free for commercial and non-commercial use. The initial release has been sized large enough to handle millions of requests per day and will be scaled as necessary to support our users the user base.

I’m currently using Tageroo which is a highly functional blog plug in that fetches both tags and images. For more great Calais products please visit the Gallery.

Tags: Analytics, Calais, Calais Web Service, Featured, machine learning, natural language processing, Open, Open Calais, Social Media, Web 2.0