The DrupalCon 2009 Conference – Washington DC – March 5, 2009 – Phase2 Technology and the Thomson Reuters Calais Initiative have debuted OpenPublish, a complete Calais-powered publishing suite for the popular open source platform, Drupal. The service is available today at http://www.OpenSourceOpenMinds.com/OpenPublish.

Tailored to meet the needs of today’s online publishers and media providers, OpenPublish offers semantic metatagging from OpenCalais and a seamless connection to the Linked Data cloud. It taps the power of Drupal as a social publishing platform and supports everything from news cov-erage to Web 2.0 trends, social publishing and the increasingly in-demand topic hubs.

“In today’s challenging media environment, publishers are struggling to make their online services more flexible and engaging -- to keep users coming back,” said Jeff Walpole, CEO, Phase2 Technology. “Publishers are being asked to do more with less while competing with myriad new content sources. Conventional content management systems are proving inadequate, making open source solutions more attractive than ever.”

OpenPublish offers a solution for publishers struggling to keep up with rapidly expanding technology and user expectations. It allows editors to rethink online news presentation and use readily available tools to reach a larger audience, simultaneously publishing stories to a CMS while inte-grating news and open data sources in ways not previously possible.

“OpenPublish empowers content creators to connect to the Linked Content Economy, a rapidly evolving ecosystem of enhanced and connected content that puts the Semantic Web and Linked Data to work in everyday media,” said Thomas Tague, Calais Initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. “We make it easy to enhance the value of content, improve the user experience and extend syn-dication to next-generation search engines, directories, social media applications and more.”

OpenPublish features automated metatagging with the Thomson Reuters Calais Web Service and helps publishers leverage suggestive tagging, geo-coding and relevancy ranking. It also enables publishers to tag entire libraries of archived content within hours for better search results, which can lead to more traffic and superior content monetization.

“Semantic technologies used with the Drupal platform help publishers enhance the user experi-ence of their web properties by improving search rankings and making content easier to find,” said Dries Buytaert, creator of the Drupal open source project and Acquia co-founder and CTO. “We welcome the OpenPublish suite to our community and encourage its future development.”

OpenPublish’s out-of-the-box functionality, with easy integration of popular features like topic hubs, and its automated metadata integration make it the ideal platform for the rapid deployment of major publishing sites. It also serves the growing market of blogs, special interest news sites and topical microsites that seek to compete with major media to break stories in their niche.

Availability: OpenPublish is available today. Learn more about it and download the modules at: http://www.OpenSourceOpenMinds.com/OpenPublish.

Phase2 Technology also offers the Calais Collection, a modular integration of the Calais Web service into the Drupal platform. Now in version 3.0, the Collection has been upgraded to support Calais 4.0 and its connection to the Linked Data cloud. To learn more, visit http://drupal.org/project/opencalais.