Gallery

Where are the pictures?

Right now Calais is a developer-oriented web service - so there's not too much pretty eye candy available. In the near future we and our development partners will be deploying Calais-based applications and plugins with a little more visual sizzle. In the meantime... pointers to some tools to get you started using Calais:

We've divided the gallery into four sections. 1) "End User Examples" shows examples of where Calais has been integrated into end-user tools and web sites. 2) "Submitting Content to Calais" focuses on application / tools that help you get your content to the Calais service, 3) "Capability Demonstrations" focuses on tools that are intended to highlight Calais' capabilities such a document viewers, etc, 4) "Developer Tools" highlights libraries and other tools to make Calais easy to integrate with your application.

End User Examples

In the end this is what it's all about - delivering value to end users. We're still in early days, but a few examples:

  • A shiny new Calais Drupal Module built by Phase2Technology is a big win. This module automatically (or manually) tags content using Calais - and because it's Drupal - the module can be used with anything from blogs to articles to just about any node type.
  • WordPress Calais Auto Tagger and Archive Tagger Dan Grossman has developed a very nice WordPress plugin that automatically tags posts as you write them and another that does the same for your archived posts. While the Calais tagging results are never going to be 100% on target - this is a great tool for improving the searchability of your historical posts in minutes.
  • The Powerhouse Museum is using Calais to automatically generate tags for items in their extensive collection. For a quick example take a look at this description of a surveying instrument. The tags generated by Calais are allowing curators and others to find connections within their collections that were previously invisible.
  • LinkedFacts.com is a very interesting demonstration of a semantically-powered news search application.
  • Topbraid has taken the fantastic step of directly integrating Calais within their TopBraid Composer. This allows users to create complex scripts that directly integrate Calais functionality.
  • Gnosis is a FireFox plugin that utilizes a slightly earlier version of the Calais web service. It automatically identifies people, company, places, etc on web pages as you browse and allows you to launch various searches based on the type of entity identified (a location, a company, a person, etc).
  • RSSTagger is a very interesting demonstration that allows you to ingest any RSS feed, tag it using Calais and embed those tags in the resulting feed. Combine this with Yahoo Pipes, some filtering and a good reader and you have a pretty interesting capability.
  • Semantic Book Suggestions is a mind bending combination of Calais, Wikipedia and Amazon. Enter a search term, the results are retrieved from Wikipedia, analyzed by Calais and then relevant selections from Amazon are presented. Take the time to play with this a bit - it's worth it. Also - make sure to click on the gray items on the left to see the drop-down menus.
  • And, coming very soon, more plugins/extensions for WordPress and Drupal. Stay tuned.

Submitting Content to Calais

If you’d like to start building simple workstreams that integrate Calais processing the command line Calais submission tool is a good starting point. The tool accepts input from STDIN, writes output to STDOUT and reads your processing parameters from a configuration file. You can download the application, source code and documentation here. Use of Calais Command Line requires a developer key and a current version (V 6) of the Java runtime environment on your machine.

Capability Demonstrations

The best place to start is with the Calais Document Viewer. The document viewer allows you to paste sample text and receive that text back with all entities, facts and events highlighted and navigable. You can also view the native RDF output and capture it for analysis in other tools.

RDF may be a beautiful thing for the representation of semantic content - but it is most definitely not a lot of fun to read. We've built a small (windows) application that will allow you to browse a folder of processed documents and see the types of semantic metadata extracted. You can download the installer here. The document viewer requires a current installation of the .NET framework.

If you want to drill a little deeper into the RDF structure, the group at Salzburg Research has created a nice desktop RDF explorer called RDF-Gravity.

We also have two great community-contributed submission tools.

  • Avinoam has developed a Windows desktop application that allows you to paste text for analysis and see the results with one click. It's located here.
  • A web-based submission tool built with Ruby by Abhay Kumar. A simple web form allows you to paste the text for analysis and view the result immediately. It's located here.

Developer Tools

A number of members of the Calais Community have put in the effort to build development toolkits and libraries for Calais. Among them are:

  • Calais.NET is a .NET 3.5 project that provides a friendly API to the Calais web service. It greatly simplifies the call structure and provides easy to use lists of extracted entities.
  • A Ruby Interface to the Calais web service built by Abhay Kumar.
  • SOAPclientForOpenCalais is an extremely well done tutorial on how to write a Java SOAP client to access the Calais web service.
  • A PHP Class for working with Calais by Dan Grossman.
  • And of course, if you just want to get in there and start coding web-services calls, the developer documentation is the place to start.