This morning we upgraded OpenCalais to release 4.7. Our focus with 4.7 was on a significant improvement in the detection and disambiguation of companies as well as some behind-the-scenes tune-ups and bug fixes. 

If your content contains company names you should already be seeing a significant improvement in detection and disambiguation. While company detection has always been very good in OpenCalais, now it's great.

If you're one of our high-volume commercial clients (1M+ transactions per day), we'll be rolling out your upgrade toward the end of the month. 

Calais Release 4.6 is Available for Beta Testing

As we mentioned in our prior post, Version 4.6 of OpenCalais is now available for beta testing. While we should have 100% backward compatibility – it’s always a good idea to run a set of transactions through and make sure there are no issues.

You’ll see a number of new things in this release:

A New OpenCalais Release On the Way

In just about one month we’re going to open up the next release of OpenCalais for beta testing. While the upgrade should be 100% backwards compatible – it’s worth setting aside a little time for testing as well as exploring some new features. 

What’s Coming?

Under the covers there are a number of improvements to our processing pipeline. As an end user you won’t see these – but they set the stage for greater flexibility in the future.

Because usage and registration for OpenCalais is very open (all we really require is a name and an email address) – it’s basically impossible for us to know who’s actually using the service. We know there are many thousands of you out there sending us many millions of documents per day – but we’re a bit in the dark about who the vast majority of you actually are.

Is OpenCalais Dead?

That was the title of a recent inquiry in our forums and a blog post by a potential user. It’s one of those catchy questions that can develop a life of it’s own - so let’s address it.

Here’s the executive summary: No. It isn’t dead. It’s alive and well and isn’t going away.

Now, a few more details. The OpenCalais team has always been open and transparent about what we’re up to - and we’ll continue that in this note.

OpenCalais has been in the news a fair amount of late, and I wanted to round up the clips for easy review here.

BIG NEWS!

The Nation Magazine, the US's oldest weekly magazine, has relaunched on the state-of-the-art OpenPublish platform from Phase2 Technologies, a Drupal distribution with OpenCalais baked-in.

The Nation Magazine’s redesign is the culmination of an 18-month effort to position the country’s oldest weekly magazine as a thought leader online.

The redesign features strategic product innovations like search-engine friendly “topic pages,” story-level Twitter feeds and instantly customizable homepage and section designs.

Introduction to OpenCalais

The free OpenCalais service and open API is the fastest way to tag the people, places, facts and events in your content.  It can help you improve your SEO, increase your reader engagement, create search-engine-friendly ‘topic hubs’ and streamline content operations – saving you time and money.

OpenCalais is free to use in both commercial and non-commercial settings, but can only be used on public content (don’t run your confidential or competitive company information through it!). OpenCalais does not keep a copy of your content, but it does keep a copy of the metadata it extracts there from.

As you may know, OpenCalais is a strategic initiative from Thomson Reuters, which is an industry leader in providing timely, accurate information to financial professionals.

Why OpenCalais?

Over the last few months you’ve probably seen a number of announcements about how OpenCalais has been chosen by one organization or another to support its business.

In a number of recent meetings I’ve been asked the (very fair) question, Why OpenCalais and not one of the other entity extraction services out there?

Given that the question seems to be coming up more often as the number of extraction services increases, I thought I’d get my best understanding of why many major players we’ve announced (and an equal number we haven’t) have chosen to go with OpenCalais. And – at the end – I’ll mention a few reasons why others haven’t chosen OpenCalais.