Release 3.1 now in Technology Preview

Well, it’s been over two weeks since we released something cool (www.semanticproxy.com) – time to get cracking on some new stuff.

We’ve placed Release 3.1 of Calais into technology preview status. Just as a reminder, technology preview is a separate instance of Calais that allows developers to evaluate new features and test their software prior to our moving the release to production. You can access the Preview by simply pointing your tool to http://beta.opencalais.com rather than http://api.opencalais.com. Just like Calais, the preview version requires that you have a developer API key – your existing key will work just fine.

We released Calais a little less than nine months ago. It’s been a fascinating process and an edifying period.

On the one hand we’ve seen a level of interest and adoption well beyond anything we’d anticipated: 6,000 registered developers. Well over 1,000,000 transactions per day. Dozens of creative and inspirational applications. It’s been great.

On the other, we have been reminded that semantically enabling the web is primarily a challenge of critical mass. Publishers are waiting for semantic consumers (search engines, news aggregators and applications) before they work on adding semantic metadata to their content.  Meanwhile application developers are waiting for the publishers to act.

Here is a quick update on Calais developer events as well as new discounts on conferences where the Calais team will be presenting in the weeks ahead.  We hope to see you there, so let us know if you can make it! 

We hope to meet as many members of the OpenCalais community as possible.  Toward that end, here is a list of the September events where we are presenting and/or holding workshops. 

We would love to see you there, so let us know if you can make it!

The Calais team is heading to some great events this fall, including the Defrag Conference in Denver, Colorado, Nov. 3 - 4, 2008.

Time Sensitive Defrag Discount: The Defrag gang has kindly offered a special discount for the OpenCalais community.

The discounted rate -- $100 off the early bird registration fee (so $895.00) -- is only available through the end of this month.   

Calais R3 Now Available

We completed our two-week Technology Preview of Calais Release 3, and it's now fully available to users. The details are located here. 

This is a long post, so I’ll highlight the significant changes right here:

We've just done a fun interview with The Guardian's Jemima Kiss, which you can find here: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/08/reuters_labs_brews_more_conten.html

As you can see, Reuters Spotlight Content API, found at http://spotlight.reuters.com, now features integration with Calais, enabling you to build news apps that include fully metatagged Reuters news.

We're all immersed in thinking about where the web is headed. Whether we call it web 3.0, the Semantic Web or whatever. We're so immersed we often have difficulty in explaining why it is important in a simple, coherent and business-relevant manner.

Photo credit J. Kiss

Matthew Buckland has written up his experience using the Calais API, Calais Tagaroo and other services to bring semantic intelligence to South Africa's Mail & Guardian Online. 

Eran Steinmetz has integrated Calais into MOSS 2007, making it easy to automatically generate semantic metadata for your content pages on Miscrosoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 content management sites. 

To learn more, please see the MOSS 2007 + Calais resource page on CodePlex, and see Amir Shevat's blog post in the integration.