FAQ - General Questions

What is Calais?

The Calais initiative seeks to help make all the world's content more accessible, interoperable and valuable via the automated generation of rich semantic metadata, the incorporation of user-defined metadata, the transportation of those metadata resources throughout the content ecosystem, and the extension of its capabilities by user-contributed components.

Calais has three major components:

• The Calais Web Service is the core and provides for the automated generation of rich semantic metadata in RDF format.
• A series of sample applications demonstrate how the Web Service can be utilized and serve as a starting point for other development activities.
• Active support is provided to developers who want to incorporate Calais capabilities in their applications and web sites.

The Calais initiative is sponsored by Thomson Reuters and built on ClearForest technology.

What does the Calais Web Service do?

From a user perspective it’s pretty simple: You hand the Web Service unstructured text (like news articles, blog postings, your term paper, etc.) and it returns semantic metadata in RDF format. What’s happening in the background is a little more complicated.

Using natural language processing and machine learning techniques, the Calais Web Service examines your text and locates the entities (people, places, products, etc.), facts (John Doe works for Acme Corporation) and events (Jane Doe was appointed as a Board member of Acme Corporation). Calais then processes the entities, facts and events extracted from the text and returns them to the caller in RDF format.

Please also check out the Calais blog and forums to see where Calais is headed. Significant development activities include the ability for downstream content consumers to retrieve previously generated metadata using a Calais-provided GUID, additional input languages, and user-defined processing extensions.

Entities? Facts? Events?

The many types of metadata that Calais can provide is described in the documentation. But remember – this is just the start. More will be coming in the near future.

Who can use it?

Just about anyone. The Calais Web Service is available to individual developers, software companies, researchers, web sites and others for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. The licensing agreement mentions a few specific restrictions on what you can use it for – but we’ve tried to keep it as open as possible.

What’s coming next?

See the official blog. We’ll be keeping this up to date as new development initiatives kick off.

What languages does Calais support?

Calais supports English, French and Spanish, and will reject non-English language submissions. Check our blog for our plans to incorporate additional languages in the near future.

What can I send to Calais?

Calais is optimized to process reasonably well written English prose. News articles, blog entries and other similar content all work well. Please see the blog for information on when Calais will support additional content types such as SEC filings, patents and others.

How much can I send? How fast is it?

Quite a lot and pretty fast. The Calais Web Service will – on average – take significantly less than a second to process a sizable news article. During the beta period we’ll be limiting usage to a total of 50,000 transactions per license per day and four transactions per second. If you have a great idea that requires more processing capability than this, please contact us and we can talk. After the beta period we'll be significantly increasing these usage limits – our goal is to allow users to submit as many documents as they need to every day.

How do I get started?

Start here by registering for an API key.

I have a suggestion or feature request.

There’s a special spot in the forums just for that, and we’d really appreciate hearing your ideas. Please let us know at Feature Requests. You may also want to the blog for information about where Calais is headed.

I'm not a web services developer. How do I try it out?

There are a growing number of applications that use Calais ranging from some simple capability demonstrations to WordPress and Drupal plugins. Take a look at the Showcase to see the range of tools available.

I have a different question!

Please start by taking a look at the forums. If that doesn’t work for you please drop us a note - here's the Contact page.