FAQ - Commercial Calais

May I use OpenCalais for commercial purposes?

Yes, as long as you comply with our Terms of Use (http://www.opencalais.com/terms).

How do I know if I need a commercial-grade Calais service?

You need a commercial Calais solution if any of the following apply:

• Your company requires a contract or service level agreement from us
• You need to process more than 50,000 documents per day
• You need to sublicense the Calais capability to your users.

What are the differences between OpenCalais and Calais Professional?

OpenCalais and Calais Professional offer the same functionality.

OpenCalais is a free service; Calais Professional is a paid service, costing $2,000 USD per month, with an annual pre-paid license.

Here are the primary additional capabilities of Calais Professional:

OpenCalais is available as-is. While we have no intention of doing so, we reserve the right to discontinue OpenCalais at any time. In addition, OpenCalais does not offer a guaranteed up-time or response time.

Calais Professional offers a service level agreement. When our utilization of our server farm gets high, we prioritize Calais Professional traffic over OpenCalais traffic.

What kinds of users generally require Calais Professional?

Here are some typical scenarios we see that generally require or benefit from a commercial Calais relationship:

• You are a large publisher or a service provider. You have a robust website or application and want to send your own content to Calais.
• You use Calais as part of an ad network
• You use Calais as part of search engine optimization.
• You use Calais for media monitoring (press clippings)
• You use Calais to gather competitive intelligence.
• You use Calais for reputation management services.
• You use Calais to create a highly refined syndication service.
• You want to extract information from resumes and populate a table or database.
• You want to extract contact information from email and populate a database or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application.
• You are building a social networking application that combines news feeds, blogs, and other text content.
• You build a product, such as a content management system, and want a plug-in that sends content to Calais. You want your users’ content to be sent to Calais.
• You are submitting content that you license from a third party.

Examples include:

• The Calais WordPress plug-in called Tagaroo http://tagaroo.opencalais.com/
• The Calais Drupal plug-in: http://drupal.org/project/opencalais
• Firefox or IE plug-ins for smart browsing or social network based browsing
• Email plug-ins to tag user emails
• Plug-ins for text repositories

Can I see how Calais processes a sample document?

Yes, please see our demonstration tool, the Calais Viewer: http://viewer.opencalais.com

• Note that the Calais Viewer is NOT the Calais service. It is merely a demonstration of how the service works.
• To use the viewer, copy and paste the text of an article from your website into the viewer, and press submit. The article is sent to the Calais engine, which tags the content and returns it.
• The tags appear on the left-hand rail, and you can click on the + sign to see the tags expand.

We also have the Calais Submission Tool: http://www.opencalais.com/SubmissionTool. This tool requires no coding on the part of the user.

New! With Calais 4.0, you can also use the viewer to see the Linked Data assets related to the metadata Calais returns.

• Click on a company name on the left-hand rail to find a Calais summary page (called a URI) featuring a basic description for that company, as well as a number of links.
• Follow those links to see the other data entries on that company that are available for public use in the Linked Data Cloud.
• For example, here is the Calais URI for IBM: http://d.opencalais.com/er/company/ralg-tr1r/9e3f6c34-aa6b-3a3b-b221-a07aa7933633.html
• And here is the “SameAs” page for IBM in DBPedia: http://dbpedia.org/page/IBM

How do I get started with Calais Professional?

Here’s what you should do to get started. Please follow these steps before you contact Calais about a commercial relationship

Register to obtain an OpenCalais key: http://www.opencalais.com/user/register

Develop a proof of concept – a small application that allows you to submit your content to OpenCalais. See http://www.opencalais.com/calaisAPI

Review your results to see how well the Calais service processes your content.

Note that you can continue to use your OpenCalais key, even for commercial applications, subject to the Terms of Service. However, most Proofs of Concept are commercial-grade applications.

If you determine that you need Calais Professional , contact us to obtain and sign a Calais Professional license: partners (at) opencalais (dot) com

Does Thomson Reuters and/or the Calais Initiative retain my content?

No, we do not retain production content. We do retain a copy of the metadata that we extract, but we do not keep a copy of the content itself. See our Terms of Use for more details.

What categories does Calais apply to documents that are submitted?

The Calais categories are mapped to the IPTC News codes (top-level Subject codes only): http://www.iptc.org/cms/site/index.html?channel=CH0103#descrncd).

With Calais 4.0, we can now assign content into the following categories:

• Business/Finance covers topics such as corporate financial results, joint business ventures, global currencies, prices and markets, stocks and bonds, prices, economic forums.
• Disaster_Accident covers topics related to man-made and natural events resulting in damage to objects, loss of life or injury.
• Education covers topics related to aspects of furthering knowledge of humans.
• Entertainment_Culture covers topics such as media, movies and TV, literature and journalism, music, celebrities, entertainment products, internet culture, youth culture.
• Environment covers topics related to the condition of our planet, natural disasters, protection, and their effect on living species as well as inanimate objects or property.
• Health_Medical_Pharma covers topics such as hospitals and healthcare, medical research, diseases, drugs, pharmaceutical industry, health insurance, diet and nutrition.
• Hospitality_Recreation covers topics such as eating and travel, leisure and recreational facilities, and general activities undertaken for pleasure and relaxation.
• Human interest covers lighter items about individuals, groups, animals or objects.
• Labor covers topics related to the employment of individuals, support of the unemployed.
• Law_Crime covers topics such as enforcement of rules of behavior in society, breaches of these rules and the resulting punishments; law firms, legal practice and lawsuits.
• Politics covers topics such as government policies and actions, politicians and political parties, elections, war and acts of aggression between countries.
• Religion_belief covers topics such as theology, philosophy, ethics and spirituality.
• Social issues covers topics related to aspects of the behavior of humans affecting the quality of life.
• Sports covers topics such as sports competitions and tournaments, athletes, Olympic games.
• Technology_Internet covers topics such as technological innovations, technology-related companies, hardware and software products, internet products and web sites, telecom industry.
• Weather covers topics relating to meteorological phenomena.
• War_Conflict covers topics related to acts of socially or politically motivated protest and/or violence.
• Other includes miscellaneous topics not covered by any of the otehr categories.

Over time, we will build up to the full 300 categories, prioritizing the process based on user demand.

I work with a library, museum, school or other non-profit, but I know I will exceed 50K submissions per day. Can you work with me?

Yes, obtain an OpenCalais key, build your Proof of Concept, and then contact us via email at partners (at) opencalais (dot) com. We will work with you.

I want Calais Professional, but I know I will have an ongoing submission rate exceeding 100K submissions per day.

We can sell you additional capacity in 100K blocks.

Do you offer variable or rate-based pricing (e.g., if my monthly submission rate varies widely)?

Our pricing is flat rate with a maximum daily cap.

I want Calais Professional. My daily submission rate will be less than 100K, but I have a large archive that I want process with Calais now.

As part of a Calais Professional agreement, we will work with you to process your reasonably sized archive. Please contact us for details at partners (at) opencalais (dot) com.

What is that maximum document size I can submit to Calais?

100K bytes. We do not support higher submission sizes at this time.

What is the minimum submission that Calais can process?

Calais works most effectively on documents that are at least two or three paragraphs long. Calais uses natural language processing and needs to have enough context – “clues” in the text like people, places or facts - to effectively identify and classify the entities in the document.

Does Calais support other languages (e.g., French, German, Mandarin)?

At this time, Calais offers robust support for English only. With the release of Calais 4.0, we have added support for a group of entities in French and Spanish – mostly related to business and finance.

Please contact us via email at partners (at) opencalais (dot) com for further language roadmap information.

Does Calais work with photos, video, audio or other media types?

No, Calais works only on text.

I have my own extraction engine that I want to use in conjunction with Calais. Can I add it?

Not at this time. However, it is possible to build your application such that it runs your text through your own extraction engine and through Calais in parallel.

Can I aggregate documents to reduce the number of submissions?

Yes. This is possible but not recommended. Your results may not be the same as if you had submitted the documents separately. Calais processes content at a document level and returns metadata for that document. Aggregated submissions are processed by Calais as a single document.

I want to submit a corpus of documents. Does Calais aggregate the metadata across these documents?

Calais processes one document at a time and does not aggregate metadata across a corpus of documents. If you need this capability, for instance, to perform trend analysis, then you will need to build this application on top of Calais.

I’m building an application wherein users will share content (blog posts, news articles, email, etc.) and/or interact within their social networks.Can OpenCalais support this / support the sublicensing of keys?

No, you will need Calais Professional to support this application.

OpenCalais does not allow sublicensing of keys. If, for example, you create a Calais-enabled email plug-in, your users must explicitly agree to our terms of use, which state that we have the right to retain – and have license rights to use – the metadata Calais extracts from any content your users process through your service.

Can Calais Professional support this type of application?

Yes, however you will need to build a scalable architecture. The key is to build a central caching architecture to prevent the same document from being processed through Calais multiple times. Once the document has been processed, it is held in your cache for subsequent requests.

We estimate that an effective caching architecture could reduce your Calais submissions by 80% to 97%. The actual reduction for your application depends upon the concentration of content and the scale of the social networks in your system. Please contact us at partners (at) opencalais (dot) com to discuss.

I am interested in populating a structured table from unstructured resumes, CVs and/or job postings, etc. Does Calais have a tool that I can use to construct the types of rules required to isolate prior work experience?

Calais may be effective in extracting an isolating the fields within the resume. The best way to determine this is to build a Proof of Concept using OpenCalais and submit some sample resumes. Calais does not provide the higher level analytics or application to populate the database with the extractions. You would have to write these applications.

Does Thomson Reuters respond to RFIs (Requests for Information) or RFPs (Requests for Proposals) re: current or future capabilities of Calais

No. We have a light-touch sales model. Your best course of action to see if Calais works in your situation is to build a proof of concept using OpenCalais. Following this vetting process and -- given that an appropriate business opportunity exists -- we will gladly engage with you and discuss our product roadmap under a non disclosure agreement (NDA).

Don’t see your question addressed here?

Shoot us a note via email at partners (at) opencalais (dot) com.