OpenCalais Partners

OpenCalais partners include major media networks, top-tier publishers and some of the most creative developers on the Web. Check out their stories below, or watch, listen and learn from our video profiles in innovation.

ThisisBristol.co.uk is the first of Northcliffe Media's (UK) local news sites to launch topic pages. Articles on the site now include inline links from key words, such as places, names and issues, to a web page gathering stories, relevant information and multimedia linked to that topic. The pages are created using OpenCalais and Nstein to analyze stories semantically and suggest subjects for topic pages. "Once a topic is mentioned more than three times, a topic page is created for that topic and an email alerts the site publisher,” Robert Hardie, content strategy director at Northcliffe, told Journalism.co.uk. “They can then decide to unpublish the page if they don't want it; allow it to stand unenhanced or gather the extra images, video and static content for it.” The site started the enhancement process with the most popular topic pages.

Al Jazeera English’s new blogging network features Al Jazeera correspondents from around the world. All posts in the new blog network are semantically tagged using OpenCalais for optimal search and navigation. It also uses a Creative Commons license and allows users to sign-in to comment using Facebook Connect, Twitter or OpenID.

Associated Content has adopted the OpenCalais service to achieve deeper classification and categorization within its vast library of over 1.7 million pieces of content, while improving on its abilities to connect advertisers with relevant, quality content.

“With upwards of 3,000 pieces of content being submitted to Associated Content every day, speed and scalability are essential to our success,” said Sonu Kansal, CTO of Associated Content. “The OpenCalais service helps us automate our classification and categorization processes, making it easy to find the most relevant concepts and connections in our quality content sets. This allows us to optimize the placement of advertising, improving results for our partners while providing readers with a more contextually relevant experience.”

Associated Newspapers is using OpenCalais to enhance their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. "OpenCalais was originally part of a suite of data mining and SEO solutions we assembled for Mail Online, and our intention was to use it to ‘Sanity Check’ the rest,” says Simon Schnieders, SEO Manager for Associated Newspapers’ Mail Online, “It speaks volumes for the service that we came to rely on OpenCalais for entity extraction."

CBS Interactive/CNET is using OpenCalais for semantic analysis of its tech product reviews, award-winning news, and blog postings on consumer electronics and technology, where it will streamline CNET’s content operations, drive audience engagement, and further extend CNET’s reach across the Web. "Using OpenCalais will allow CNET to aggregate and organize content in new ways, produce topic-based sites, improve search functionality and generate improved content recommendations," says Jim Stanley, Vice-President of Products, CBS Interactive Technology & News.

In addition, CNET is joining Thomson Reuters and the OpenCalais initiative in publishing core data assets for public, programmatic use on the Linked Data cloud. CNET will make its original content – such as tech product reviews on laptops, TVs, smart phones, and digital cameras; news articles and blog posts from its CNET News editorial staff; and parts of its core technology product catalog - available for public use. Read about CNET’s pioneering work in this ReadWriteWeb article.

DailyMe is using OpenCalais to achieve a new level of personalization.  "OpenCalais helps us to create a picture of a user’s behavior and interests, so that we can personalize the news for them," says Neil Budde, President and Chief Product Officer. “That capability has enabled us to add automated personalization features that both improve our readers’ experience and help optimize ad targeting for our partners.”  Read more about the innovation taking place at DailyMe in this Now Possible article.

Feedly is a Firefox plug-in brings to life user-selected inputs from Google Reader, friendfeed, Twitter, RSS feeds and more in an easy-to-read and engaging magazine-style format. “Feedly makes news reading fun again,” says Feedly founder and CEO, Edwin Khodabakchian. “By employing OpenCalais and other semantic technologies on the back end for clustering, linking and organizing, we’re working to deliver the world’s best news reading experience at the front end.”  See our video interview with Edwin in our video profiles in innovation.

Harvard University Berkman Center for the Internet and Society ~ ‘MediaCloud’: Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman and Berkman Faculty Co-Director Yochai Benkler integrated OpenCalais into their ‘MediaCloud’ open research tool at www.MediaCloud.org, to make it easy for users to explore concepts in relation to the rest of the network of media sources. 

“While daily newspapers struggle for survival, political, niche and special interest blogs continue to thrive,” says Yochai Benkler, Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Center. “In the midst of this upheaval, it is difficult to know where stories begin, who sets the agenda, and how these dramatic changes impact news coverage on the whole.  We created Media Cloud to help researchers and the public get quantitative answers to these challenging questions.”

The Huffington Post is using OpenCalais to reach new milestones in localization. “OpenCalais enables our editors to more efficiently locate related local stories,” says Paul Berry, CTO. “This helps the site meet an important strategic goal: cost-effectively producing regional microsites that ‘super-serve’ communities with the best local news, as we have done in Chicago.”  Read more about the work Paul is doing at The Huffington Post in this CNET article.

I *heart* Sea is a hyperlocal news aggregation site that collects some of the best blogs in Seattle, especially those serving the Capitol Hill area. I *heart* Sea uses OpenCalais to automatically tag the keywords of the blog posts in aggregates, to make it easier to find related information.

Oracle has integrated the OpenCalais service into Oracle Database 11g Release 2 as part of the Semantic Technologies feature of Oracle Spatial. With the new integration, the OpenCalais web service can be called directly by Oracle's Semantic Technologies, an advanced semantic data management capability not found in any other commercial or open source database.

"Connecting the OpenCalais service - which has helped popularize semantic technologies in the developer community - with the Oracle Database is a compelling value proposition for our customers," said Xavier Lopez, Director, Spatial and Semantic Technologies, Oracle Server Technologies. "This interoperability lets users quickly process documents in different formats (such as Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF), to extract semantic metadata that can be used for more semantically complete searches in Oracle 11g."

The New Republic The all new TNR.com uses OpenPublish, an OpenCalais-enabled Drupal-powered Content Management System (CMS) to increase editorial productivity, improve search engine optimization, and drive reader engagement, including faceted search, recommended reading sidebars and – coming soon – automatically generated topic hubs.

Slate Magazine's News Dots Network visualizes the most recent topics in the news as a concise network of related topics. Like a human social network, the news tends to cluster around popular topics, and most stories are more closely related than one might think. Behind the scenes, News Dots scans all the articles from major publications—about 500 a day—and submits them to OpenCalais to identify the relevant people, places, companies, topics, etc.

AskJot is a tool for analyzing web pages for keywords, and displaying them as links to search results from various services around the Web. Developed by John Wright of Wright Labs and formerly known as Semantalyzr, Ask Jot uses OpenCalais,  The New York Times article search API, DBPedia, the Yahoo! Answers API, the flickr API and many more.

Interceder is a social media monitoring tool that makes it easy to track trending topics and search through the latest content from major news Web sites, blogs, Twitter and YouTube.  Interceder uses the Daylife API, OpenCalais, Freebase, and Yahoo! Pipes to retrieve the latest news from major news websites.

Tattler (app) is an open source topic monitoring tool for today's Web. Tattler finds and aggregates content from the Web on topics users ask it to monitor. Using OpenCalais and other Semantic Web technologies, Tattler mines news, websites, blogs, multimedia sites, and other social media like Twitter, to find mentions of the issues most relevant to users’ selected topics, making it easy for users to filter, organize, share, and take action on content gathered from the real-time Web.

DocumentCloud. Founded by reporters from The New York Times and ProPublica, and funded by the Knight Foundation, DocumentCloud is a unique online resource that will offer public access to news reporters’ original source materials, including documents, media files and more. OpenCalais processes materials available through DocumentCloud to make it easy for users to explore connections between newsmakers, corporations, transactions and even quotations across documents and across the full collection of source information.

OpenPublish based on the popular open source publishing platform Drupal, is a next-generation CMS that has been tailored to the needs of today's online publishers (magazines, newspapers, journals, trade publications, broadcast and wire services). Developed by Phase2 Technology, it uses semantic metatagging from OpenCalais to streamline content operations, automatically create topic hubs and recommend related articles and archived ‘more from this author’ stories.

Sound good? 

Whether you are a publisher, curator, marketer or developer, OpenCalais can help you compete. OpenCalais makes it easy to improve your search and navigation, enhance the value of your content, increase your user engagement and extend your reach. Get started with our free service and open API today.

To discuss a license and service level agreement, please contact: Chris Lamb at Partners (at) ThomsonReuters (dot) com.