Today we’re announcing the release of Calais 4.0. As we’ve discussed in previous notes there are many new features in this release that we think will dramatically improve the value of Calais to content publishers and consumers.

The detailed release notes are located here. If you’re a Calais developer you should definitely dig in and start reading – there are many new features and accessing them will require some modifications to code on your end.

You may also want to read our press release - you can find it here.

Let’s just cover a few of the big items in this release.

Linked Data
Extracting entities is great – being able to use those extractions to open a whole world of reference data about those entities is even better. In this release approximately 25 entities are now connected to the Linked Data cloud. As a simple example you can extract a company name using Calais. You are then able to not only retrieve basic Company information from the Calais Linked Data endpoints – you are also able to follow links in these endpoints to DBPedia and other sources to gather a wide range of additional information about the company. So – rather than just having the company name you have the Name, the ticker, the industry codes, the description, the members of the Board, the products, the locations…. You get the idea.

Metadata Transport
Extracting rich metadata is important – being able to share it with others in the content world is even more important. With release 4.0 we provide you with a tool for sharing your and Calais’ metadata with anyone. By simply providing your content partners with the document level identifier your partners – whether they are news aggregators, search engines, RSS readers or others – have the ability to directly retrieve the semantic metadata associated with the content via a simple HTTP call.

Language(s)
You’ve asked for languages and we’re getting started moving down that path. With release 4 we’ve incorporated entity recognition in French and plan to expand these capabilities to additional languages over the course of 2009.

Other
You’ll also find some significant extensions to our metadata generation capabilities in the areas of product identification, competitive intelligence and judicial events. We’ve also expanded the document level categorization capabilities to include recreation, environment, weather and legal topics.

Jump in and start exploring! If you’d like to get a quick taste of the linked data capabilities we’ve enhanced our viewer application, which is located here. We suggest you paste an article containing companies and start exploring the hyperlinks on the left.

We've also created a new desktop document submission and viewing tool that allows you to Calais your content with no programming required. Instruction on installation and use are located here.

To start working with 4.0 simply point your application to the 4.0 API at beta.opencalais.com. We'll have more details on the length of the beta period available soon.

Regards,

The Calais Team