NEW YORK - Thomson Reuters today announced the debut of Calais 4.0, a free Web service and open API that makes it easy for publishers to enhance the value of their content, improve the reader experience and connect to the emerging linked content economy.

"In just one year, we've engaged top-tier publishers, registered 9,000 developers and processed 200+ million articles," said

Thomas Tague , Calais initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. "Today we're taking the next step by automatically connecting publishers to the exploding ecosystem of Linked Data assets on the Web, and helping them syndicate their content via global metadata transport to reach more downstream readers."

Found at OpenCalais.com (http://www.OpenCalais.com), the Calais Web service is the fastest, easiest and most accurate way to tag the people, places, companies, facts and events in content to increase its value, accessibility and interoperability on the Web.

Calais 4.0 goes beyond metatagging to help publishers automatically integrate their content with Linked Data and open Web assets from Wikipedia, DBpedia, GeoNames, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Shopping.com and many more. Calais 4.0 also makes it easy for publishers to share rich semantic metadata about their content with such content consumers as search engines, news aggregators, 'related stories' recommendation services and more.

The Linked Data cloud is a valuable and rapidly growing public information asset. Just as an editor might link to a Wikipedia entry to provide readers with background or context, publishers can use Linked Data assets to define -- and provide reference data for -- the key concepts in their content in a language that computers and databases can read. With Calais 4.0, publishers can leverage these assets to dramatically enhance their content at no incremental cost.

In keeping with its commitment to the Linked Data standard, Thomson Reuters has also made a set of public business data assets available for use on the Web. The collection represents the first contribution to the Linked Data cloud made by a major publisher. It enables developers to programmatically access and use fundamental facts on hundreds of thousands of publically-traded companies, including company descriptions, stock tickers, management teams and more.

"By sharing basic business data with developers on the open Web, we hope to foster collaboration and advance interoperability across content communities," Tague added. "Publishers who use Calais to leverage Linked Data assets can provide better news aggregation services and a superior reader experience. These innovators will be positioned to lead in the emerging linked content economy."

Calais 4.0 in Practice:

1. With Calais 4.0, each document - and every significant semantic element within that document - is assigned a unique identifier (a 'uniform resource identifier' or URI). These identifiers are returned to the content owner along with the rest of the metadata Calais discovered.

2. Unlike simple "tagging" solutions, the rich semantic metadata Calais returns can then be used to enhance publishers' content for improved search, navigation, ad placement and syndication.

Each of the semantic elements Calais 4.0 discovers also provides a 'key' to unlocking additional content assets in the Linked Data ecosystem.

3. Finally, the unique document and entity identifiers returned by Calais can be shared with content partners and content consumers to enable the seamless transfer of not just content - but of the underlying meaning and relevance of that content.

To see Calais 4.0 in action, use the Calais Viewer Technology Preview tool. To see an example of a Linked Data entity, see the URI for IBM.

With the release of Calais 4.0, Thomson Reuters is also publishing the Calais schema in the industry standard resource description framework schema (RDFS). This will enable developers to access to a growing toolkit of schema-aware tools to work with Calais' metadata output.

In keeping with Calais' commitment to 'connect everything,' additional advances in version 4.0 include:

• Entity identification in French; the first step in an aggressive plan to incorporate the world's major languages that will continue throughout 2009.

• Significant enhancements to the semantic metadata generation capabilities in the areas of product identification, competitive intelligence and judicial events.

• Significant enhancements to automated document level categorization in the areas of recreation, environment, weather and legal.

To learn more about Calais 4.0, please visit OpenCalais.com/Blog.