A (relatively) brief note to discuss release 2.1 of Calais – which is going live this morning.

The Calais team is really hitting it's stride - as I think you'll see from the wide range of updates and improvements to Calais available in release 2.1 . Unlike some of our earlier point releases – which focused solely on deploying new and improved entities, facts and events – this release has some significant new functionality.

We’ll cover the new items briefly here – please see the documentation and gallery for the full details.

Continued Knowledge Domain Growth - New Entities
From Radio Programs to Market Index names to Nationality to Car models – we’ve deployed a wide range of new entity types.

Cutting Through the Noise - Relevance Ranking
Extracting what’s in a piece of unstructured content is what Calais does – now we help you understand what’s important in that content. Our R&D team has been working for some time to create sophisticated algorithms for the evaluation of relevance – essentially how important a particular entity is to the overall document. Relevance scores each entity in the document from zero (low relevance) to 1 (highly relevant). This score can help you create cut-offs for automatic tagging, incorporation of metadata in tag clouds and other purposes.

If you’re processing news this is a pretty big deal. Barring a great headline it has historically been difficult to filter through the noise and find those few entities that truly best characterize an article’s key topics – now you can.

Semantic Smarts in Everyday Browsing
Gnosis is our browser plugin that brings the semantic metadata generation capabilities of Calais directly to your browser. We’ve released an upgraded version of Gnosis for FireFox that now incorporates selected events as well as entities – and it’s now FireFox 3 compatible. And, good news, we now have an Internet Explorer version of Gnosis available. With over 10,000 active Gnosis for FireFox users we’re very interested in seeing how far we can spread the word with the inclusion of Internet Explorer.

Pipes!
This is really cool. Calais can now be directly invoked from Yahoo Pipes. Inserted as a web service call in your RSS processing stream, the Calais Pipes call analyzes the content of your feed and automatically annotates it with entities and selected events. This is a great way to experiment with Calais and can serve as a launch pad for sophisticated RSS filtering applications.

Over the past couple of months we've had the opportunity to attend several conferences and receive direct feedback from developers and end users about what they like, don't like and would like to see in Calais. This release contains some of those items - but many more will be coming in the future.

As always: a big thank you to the entire Calais community for your feedback, experimentation and willingness to participate. The Calais ecosystem - the service and the tools built on top of it - is growing rapidly. Something very very interesting is happening here - and we're excited to be part of it.