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.

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.

We released OpenCalais 4.3 a day or so ago - and we’ve run into a few issues as we’ve rolled it out into production. We think we have a handle on the fixes needed – but to play it safe we’re going to roll back to Release 4.2 for at least the weekend.
 
Sorry for any inconvenience – but we’d rather play it safe and take a day or two to get things totally in shape.
 
Tom

Here’s what’s up. Over the last several months you may have read about partnerships between OpenCalais and organizations like CNET/CBSi, The Huffington Post, Magus, Associated Content, and a variety of others. And we, of course, think those are great.

Hi all – just a little snippet of news today.

We’ve been busy working to keep up with the increased demand for Opencalais services. A lot of engineering going on in the background around scalability, performance and reliability.

The good news is that it is all paying off. Over the last three months we’ve achieved 100% uptime while improving performance and a delivering a number of functional improvements in the service - all while seeing growing utilization.

One result of our recent work is that the system is more efficient and scalable. Given our goal of connecting the world’s content – scalability is more than a little important.

OpenCalais Release 4.1 Available Today

The Gist:

• Introducing Social Tags – a knowledgebase-driven tagging solution
• Entity extraction now supported in English, French and Spanish
• Significant improvements to Linked Data depth and breadth
• Introducing the “Recession Pack” of topical fact and event extraction

Over the last several months we’ve been hard at work in the boiler room doing a fair amount of engineering work on OpenCalais. While not exciting – we’ve made significant improvements to the system’s reliability and scalability.

We’ll be releasing version 4.1 of OpenCalais on Monday 15 June (and Release 4.2 about three weeks later!). This release has a number of new features – but for the moment we want to focus on making certain it is backwards compatible with your existing applications.

Beginning now, version 4.1 is exposed for compatibility testing at the API access point of http://beta.opencalais.com. Just point your application to this address, make sure everything works and then point back to the default http://api.opencalais.com.

As you may have noticed we've had some intermittent stability and response time issues over the last few days. We believe we have the problem solved - or at least quarantined.

We have one particularily high volume user who submits a very wide range of content types to us. Due to some errors in the way they were using the API and some errors in the way we were handling errors (whew..) - we were seeing system utilizations that were off the chart.

We've moved that user to their own little quarantine island until we get things worked out with them. As soon as we did this - the remainder of our servers paused for a moment, took a deep breath, and then went back to almost idle - where they belong.

Last chance for testing. Effective early in the morning hours of 3/17 all calls going to Calais will be redirected to version 4 of the service. If you haven't tested your application with version 4 this would be a really really good time to do so.

Details are located here.

While we will be sympathetic if your tool, website, application breaks when we cut over - we won't be rolling back to Release 3.