WHAT'S NEW?

OpenCalais Sees Commercial Adoption for SEO, Reader Engagement, Media Monitoring, Corporate Governance and More

KristaThomas — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 22:02:56 -0500

SemTech 2010 – San Francisco, Calif. – June 24, 2010 –Thomson Reuters today cited four innovative companies that are pioneering the large-scale and commercial use of its OpenCalais service to enrich and optimize digital content. They include Moreover Technologies, a world-leading media aggregation and monitoring provider; Morris Communications, a top-tier regional publisher; Magus Ltd., the British pioneer of enterprise website governance, and Prefix, South Africa’s leading Content Management System (CMS).

“Two and a half years in, we are extremely pleased to be part of leading publishing platforms and media monitoring solutions around the world,” said Tom Tague, OpenCalais Initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. “We’re processing five million documents per day and storing 90 billion triples, which may well be the world’s largest collection of structured facts and events. It reflects a growing percentage of the English language news articles, blog posts and social media status updates posted every day.”

Joining CBS Interactive / CNET, Huffington Post, The New Republic, The Nation and more than 50 other publishers, entrepreneurs and service providers using OpenCalais are:

Moreover Technologies. One of the original news aggregators on the Web, Moreover provides companies with “news and views” in a comprehensive solution for business intelligence, mainstream media and social media monitoring. It aggregates, refines and delivers millions of daily articles, blog posts and social media updates from more than a million editorially vetted sources spanning 800 searchable industries in 100-plus countries, and 50-plus languages.

Moreover Technologies uses OpenCalais to categorize and tag news and blog content as well as social media status updates to provide superior mainstream and social media monitoring services to clients of all kinds.

”Equally important to quantity of information is quality,” said Paul Farrell, President of Moreover Technologies. “It’s imperative to be able to retrieve rapidly the most relevant and pinpointed results possible from vast repositories of business intelligence. Our partnership with OpenCalais substantially enhances our ability to make sure clients get the right results at the right time.”

Morris Communications. A leading southeastern media company, Morris Communications has newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising, radio, book publishing and online properties. Its digital arm, Morris DigitalWorks, turned to OpenCalais while digitizing the archives of its 13 daily newspapers, including the Augusta Chronicle; the Florida Times-Union; the Savannah Morning News; the noted local Journalism experiment Bluffton Today and more.

"We strive to be unrivaled in the delivery of local news and information to our readership in every possible medium. So it is essential to be able to repurpose our content for any number of uses – including digital distribution on the Web, mobile, etc.,” said Michael Romaner, President, Morris DigitalWorks. “OpenCalais has helped us achieve that mission in two ways. By improving the relevancy of our content for Web searches, we have increased both our overall page-views from search engines, and our retention of those readers once they arrive. We look forward to expanding on this successful alliance."

Magus Ltd. Magus is the pioneering UK company behind ActiveStandards™: the market-leading SaaS platform for enterprise website governance used by Unilever, Shell, Philips, ING and more. ActiveStandards takes web content governance to a new level by enabling companies to coordinate the policies, processes and people that underpin their web presence within a single integrated framework, and monitor and manage compliance.

Magus uses OpenCalais to power ActiveStandards’ “Content Insight Reports” – a suite of powerful semantic reports which extend the reach of online governance by providing visibility and control over unstructured content.

“Semantic Web technologies are revolutionizing the way people find and use information online,” said Simon Lande, CEO, Magus Ltd. “Our alliance with OpenCalais enables us to leverage this technology to bring about a step-change in the way that companies monitor and manage their online content. We see it as a revolution in content governance.”

Prefix Technologies. Provider of South Africa’s most popular off- and online CMS, Prefix is a trusted Web-applications development company. Prefix solutions enable magazine, newspaper and online publishers to collect, store, share and monetize content in new ways that increase competitive advantage while improving efficiency and reducing costs.

Prefix uses OpenCalais as a processing layer for Preditor’s Semantic Tagging Engine. With a powerful tagging rules toolkit on a per-magazine basis, Preditor customers with multiple magazines on Preditor are able to draw content out of their archives and build smart links across a the network for their readers. In one case study, they’ve scanned through and linked over 10 years of archives.

”We’ve seen significant increases in archive monetization for our customers with our OpenCalais implementation. Equally, it’s been incredible to explore new ideas in both the print and digital worlds to create content packages through semantic discovery,” said Josh Adler, CEO, Prefix. “We feel we’ve interpreted the semantic opportunity in a unique way for traditional media and OpenCalais opened that door for us.”

Testing Twitter Blackbird Pie

KristaThomas — Tue, 04 May 2010 18:25:43 -0500

Introduction to OpenCalais

KristaThomas — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 16:53:24 -0500

Introduction to OpenCalais

The free OpenCalais service and open API is the fastest way to tag the people, places, facts and events in your content. It can help you improve your SEO, increase your reader engagement, create search-engine-friendly ‘topic hubs’ and streamline content operations – saving you time and money.

OpenCalais is free to use in both commercial and non-commercial settings, but can only be used on public content (don’t run your confidential or competitive company information through it!). OpenCalais does not keep a copy of your content, but it does keep a copy of the metadata it extracts there from.

To repeat, OpenCalais is not a private service, and there is no secure, enterprise version that you can buy to operate behind a firewall. It is your responsibility to police the content that you submit, so make sure you are comfortable with our Terms of Service (TOS) before you jump in.

You can process up to 50,000 documents per day (blog posts, news stories, Web pages, etc.) free of charge. If you need to process more than that – say you are an aggregator or a media monitoring service – then see this page to learn about Calais Professional. We offer a very affordable license.

OpenCalais’ early adopters include CBS Interactive / CNET, Huffington Post, Slate, Al Jazeera, The New Republic, The White House and more. Already more than 30,000 developers have signed up, and more than 50 publishers and 75 entrepreneurs are using the free service to help build their businesses.

You can read about the pioneering work of these publishers, entrepreneurs and developers here.

To get started, scroll to the bottom section of this page. To build OpenCalais into an existing site or publishing platform (CMS), you will need to work with your developers.

Why OpenCalais Matters

The reason OpenCalais – and so-called “Web 3.0” in general (concepts like the Semantic Web, Linked Data, etc.) – are important is that these technologies make it easy to automatically connect the people, companies and concepts in your content to the related content on the rest of the Web.

So when you’re writing about Twitter's new Promoted Tweets offering, you can be automatically connected to the other stories about Twitter's Promoted Tweets without having to embed links along the way.

Creating standardized metadata is about revealing the connections between people, companies, concepts and events and forging connections to relevant and related content automatically – streamlining your editorial processes and saving you time and expense along the way.

Ultimately, this new set of technologies is driving the next wave of innovation in digital media, and has the potential to inspire yet another “boom” similar to what we saw with SEO and SEM.

As innovators like MediaCloud, ViewChange.org and Hedgehogs.net (three more OpenCalais early adopters) lead the way, we will see more and more publishers, entrepreneurs and developers learning how to work with the new tools.

Why OpenCalais is Free

OpenCalais is a strategic initiative from Thomson Reuters to support the interoperability of content across the digital landscape.

Our goal with this initiative is not to make money, but rather to make it easy for folks to categorize and tag their content in a uniform and consistent fashion that complies with Semantic Web standards.

Offering a de-facto standard for making content interoperable in this fashion ultimately benefits Thomson Reuters, as it enables us to track themes, memes and trends on the Web, and to potentially do things like link out to relevant content that helps provide context to our readers, customers and other constituents.

The value exchange to us is in the metadata, in the growing body of interoperable content, and in the ability to support innovation, experimentation and the continued evolution of the Web.

We are fully committed to OpenCalais, and we offer the API for both commercial and non-commercial purposes precisely to inspire creativity and enterprise by a new wave of innovators and entrepreneurs.

There is no plan to someday "drop the other shoe" and charge folks for the basic service.

How That Helps You

Ultimately, OpenCalais provides start-up entrepreneurs, publishers and institutions like libraries, museums and universities with the ability to forge a path into the future of digital media.

In addition to being a source for inspiration and innovation, the free service is a time- and cost-saving tool. It’s the fastest way to tag the people, places, facts and events in your content – and the easiest way to get the metadata you need in order to get truly creative with your user experience and user interface.

As our partners will attest, OpenCalais can help you:

Improve your SEO as well as search and navigation within your own site
Enhance your content with free open data assets from the Linked Data cloud
Increase your reader engagement with greater personalization, ‘related reading’ sidebars, ‘more by this author’ widgets, search-engine-friendly ‘topic hubs’ and more.
Streamline your editorial processes and content operations to save both time and money.

We are also thrilled that our price point has made OpenCalais a favorite with open source platforms like the Drupal Community, public research initiatives like DocumentCloud, and Ushahidi / Swift River – a leading real-time platform for crisis communications used in disaster recovery efforts around the world.

How to Get Started

There are a number of easy ways to get started.

If you are on WordPress, try the easy-to-install Calais Tagaroo plug-in, which automatically tags your content as you type. It can also fetch images from Flickr and videos from Google Video, which you can select for inclusion in your post, or disregard.

*Note: You must have a hosted site – or your own server – where you have access to install WordPress plugins in order to use Tagaroo. Blogs hosted on WordPress.com won’t work with Tagaroo.

If you want to manipulate your search results appearance in Google and Yahoo!, you can try Calais Marmoset, which is simple javacode you embed in your site pages. Marmoset will collect the metadata from your page (in the form of RDFa) and hand it over to Google Rich Snippets> and Yahoo! Search Monkey so that you can customize the way your search results appear.

If you want to extract metadata from Web pages using URLs, then try our Semantic Proxy service at SemanticProxy.com.

If you are using the popular open source platform Drupal, you can find a complete Calais Collection of modules for easy integration.

If you are building a new site from the ground up, consider usingOpenPublish, a free Content Management System based on Drupal.

OpenPublish bakes-in OpenCalais from the ground up to “semantify” your site and automate the creation of ‘related reading’ widgets, ‘topic hubs’ and more. OpenPublish comes from Phase2 Technology and Thomson Reuters, and now comes with the option of fee-based support and hosting from Drupal founder Dries Buytaert’s company, Acquia.

To build OpenCalais into an existing site or publishing platform (CMS), you will need to work with your developers. Developers can find the resources and information they need on the OpenCalais documentation pages, and – for general education on the Semantic Web - at Semantic Universe.

Thanks for reading, and please join the open conversation with us on Twitter.

Follow @OpenCalais or @KristaThomas for general updates.
Follow @TomTague or @FinkelM for technical questions.

Developers: Win up to $25K in cash and prizes in The StreetApps Challenge

KristaThomas — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:05:29 -0500

As you may know, OpenCalais is a strategic initiative from Thomson Reuters, which is an industry leader in providing timely, accurate information to financial professionals.

With those professionals increasingly turning to mobile devices, Thomson Reuters is challenging developers to build the most useful, high-quality, and visually appealing mobil apps, and offering $25,000 in cash, as well as premium mobile device prizes and a feature on the New York Times Square jumbotron.

The StreetApps Challenge team is opening up access to Thomson Reuters premium content for the challenge through Thomson Reuters Knowledge Direct, an application programming interface (API). Contestants are also encouraged to include relevant external content that will differentiate their application.

This competition's intention is to include developers in the creative process and challenge the public to think differently about how financial professionals use their mobile devices while on-the-go.

Importantly, as a part of Thomson Reuters commitment to the mobile space, developers maintain all intellectual property ownership for their submissions.

For more details, go to: http://www.streetappschallenge.com

OpenCalais Powers Global Disaster Response and Real-Time Communications Platforms, Video News Services, iPad Apps and More

KristaThomas — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 07:38:49 -0500

New York, New York and Boston, Massachusetts – April 28, 2010 – Thomson Reuters today cited 10 innovative sites and services that use OpenCalais to deliver global disaster response and real-time communications services, compelling video content experiences or intelligence gleaned by mining the Social Web for insight.

“More than 30,000 entrepreneurs, publishers and developers have joined the OpenCalais Initiative to bring global communications capabilities, contextual intelligence and breakthrough innovations to the Web,” said Thomas Tague, OpenCalais Initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. “We are thrilled to be powering creative news applications on the iPad as well as some of today’s most important communications platforms for global change – empowering citizen journalists for social good, and harvesting the goodwill of the crowd.”

The newest publishers and media platform providers to join CBS Interactive / CNET, Huffington Post, The New Republic, Al Jazeera and others in using OpenCalais include:

Ushahidi / SwiftRiver – http://swift.ushahidi.com/ - Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, is the leading platform for socially-powered, real-time global communications in times of crisis. Any individual or organization can use Ushahidi to collect, communicate and visualize information. Ushahidi's new, open source platform, called SwiftRiver, uses OpenCalais to identify key people, organizations, facts and events in such topics as ongoing political or ecological crises, and to reveal previously undetected connections among relevant people, places, companies and more.

"SwiftRiver's purpose is to allow organizations to filter through large real-time data sets from sources like Twitter, Email and RSS by applying various algorithms that determine accuracy,” said Jon Gosier, Director of SwiftRiver. “With OpenCalais we've added new features for inferring relationships between information sets that would otherwise appear to be unrelated."

ViewChange.org – http://www.linktv.org/viewchange – LinkTV’s new global media online hub, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, features videos on the progress being made in reducing hunger, poverty, and disease in developing nations around the world. ViewChange.org uses OpenCalais to surface related content for its video stories to give viewers insight, context and analysis on important developments on the full array of global change initiatives.

"We are thrilled to be using OpenCalais to help us bring these essential stories to the world," said Hannah Eaves, LinkTV and Link Media Inc. "We believe that automatically tying deep context and action opportunities to video stories about developing nations will open up many new roads to understanding and change."

Allvoices.com - http://www.allvoices.com/ – Allvoices.com is the first international open media site that pulls news, video and images from across the globe into one place. Allvoices.com uses OpenCalais to make meaningful connections between individuals, reporters and citizen journalists and the wide variety of issues and events they report on.

“We are first and foremost a people’s media company; our mission is to leverage in-country reports from around the world into mainstream media,” said founder and CEO Amra Tareen. “We hope to bring a level of intimacy to global reporting by integrating stories and reports that would normally receive little to no coverage into the greater global conversation.”

Three Minute Media – http://tmmnews.com – Three Minute Media is a new Web video news network that features video interviews and in-depth analysis of business news from former Forbes reporter James Erik Abels. Three Minute Media uses OpenCalais to generate and select metatags for each story, improving search and navigation and powering the site’s ‘Related Stories’ feature.

Innovative services using OpenCalais to deliver intelligent content experiences include:

Digest– http://readitlaterlist.com/digest--The new ‘Digest’ Application for Apple Computer’s iPad and the popular ‘Read it Later’ bookmarking service for Firefox, iPhone make it easy to save news stories, Web pages and more, and then retrieve them to read later on iPad, desktop or mobile with ease. Both Digest and Read it Later use OpenCalais to automatically categorize stories and quickly sort them into helpful folders for reading ease.

Hedgehogs.net - http://www.hedgehogs.net/ - Hedgehogs is a social application platform for the hedge fund and investment community and those who serve it. It uniquely supports the social and collaborative aspects of trading and investment, enabling members to discuss and develop trading ideas; share commercial propositions, and collaborate to deliver tangible business targets. Hedgehogs uses OpenCalais to automatically index and cross reference content from heterogeneous sources, as the basis for persistent search and alerts, and to power its automated contextual "related content" capability.

FeedTrace – http://www.feedtrace.com -.FeedTrace enables anyone to mine Twitter content for links, and makes it easy to find the most relevant news, articles and videos being shared on Twitter by link popularity. FeedTrace uses OpenCalais to categorize popular links to help you quickly navigate through real-time content to find the ‘right time content’ that matters most.

Academic Institutions using OpenCalais to support research and discovery include:

The British Library – http://www.bl.uk/ - The British Library is using OpenCalais to help power its UK Web Archive project, along with Hadoop, Nutch, Pig Latin, as well as IBM’s BigSheets and InfoSphere classification tool. Read more here.

Tufts University’s Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) – http://vue.tufts.edu/ - Tufts University’s Visual Understanding Environment uses OpenCalais to help power its flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.

The University of Karlsruhe – http://www.kit.edu/ and http://www.uni-karlsruhe.de/visitors/index.php (English) - The University of Karlsruhe uses OpenCalais as a central component of its news event ontology to model business events. Read more here.

OpenCalais' Krista Thomas on Marketing content

KristaThomas — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:35:06 -0500

Video Introduction to the Semantic Web

KristaThomas — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:44:03 -0600

Why OpenCalais?

Tom — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:15:41 -0600

Why OpenCalais?

Over the last few months you’ve probably seen a number of announcements about how OpenCalais has been chosen by one organization or another to support its business.

In a number of recent meetings I’ve been asked the (very fair) question, Why OpenCalais and not one of the other entity extraction services out there?

Given that the question seems to be coming up more often as the number of extraction services increases, I thought I’d get my best understanding of why many major players we’ve announced (and an equal number we haven’t) have chosen to go with OpenCalais. And – at the end – I’ll mention a few reasons why others haven’t chosen OpenCalais.

So, in no particular order, why do organizations choose Calais?

Thomson Reuters

OpenCalais is provided by Thomson Reuters – the largest professional information organization in the world.

If you’re interested in kicking around some semantic technologies in your spare time this doesn’t really matter. If you’re incorporating those technologies deep within your business – or, as is true with many users – actually building a new business on top of them, this becomes pretty important. Basically – you need to know that the service is going to be there for you.

Facts & Events

With the increase in structured content assets like Wikipedia / DBpedia, it’s become pretty easy to knock out a basic entity extraction tool. And – while we like entity extraction as much as anyone else – it’s really just the tiniest starting point in what you can and will need to do.

OpenCalais extracts a wide range of facts and events from unstructured content and lets you know what’s happening in your content – not just tags for things.

Facts are things like “John Doe is CEO of XYZ Corporation.”
Events are things like “XYZ Corporation today announced that it would acquire ACME Corporation.”

OpenCalais is the only service that does this in a production-strength manner.

Reliability

OpenCalais stays up. It’s hosted in mirrored data centers thousands of miles apart from each another. It’s monitored 7*24. It basically doesn’t go down – even during system upgrades and maintenance. We stopped adding 9s after we got beyond 99.99% uptime.

Accuracy

We’ve been building the tools underneath OpenCalais for over a decade. They’ve been used by hundreds of organizations and many many thousands of end users. One of the things we’ve learned is that accuracy matters. While no NLP system is perfect, we’re convinced ours is the best and we have some ideas in the pipeline to increase accuracy even more.

Integration

We basically focus on providing great semantic plumbing. But we know that not everyone wants to be a plumber. We’ve worked to integrate (or motivate others to integrate) OpenCalais with a wide range of tools including Drupal, WordPress, WordPress Multiuser, Oracle, Lucene, Coldfusion, Flash, Firefox, Prolog, Lisp, Django, Java, PHP, Python, Alfresco, Perl, .NET, Ruby, TopBraid and a few others.

From content management systems to language-specific libraries – there are lots of ways to get started quickly.

Linked Data

We’re serious about Linked Data. We’re also worried about the proliferation of incorrect links and the effects of link rot. So, rather than just pointing to Linked Data assets out on the cloud and risking that they’ll go stale, we host our own Linked Data cloud, which is kept up to date with both Thomson Reuters contributed content as well as regularly validated links to other sources such as DBpedia, Freebase and others.

SocialTags

Pure semantic extraction is great – but sometimes you need more. If you’re writing about Porsches and Ferraris you’d probably like to have categorization concepts like “sports cars” and “automobiles” returned to you with your semantic metadata. OpenCalais does this via our ever-improving SocialTags concept tagging capability. It’s good now, and it’s going to get a lot better soon.

Focus

OpenCalais is here to provide great semantic plumbing. We’re not trying to sell ads. We’re not trying to provide the prettiest decorations for blogs. We build the plumbing – you architect the solutions.

Now, in a spirit of transparency, here’s why some people don’t choose OpenCalais:

Languages

We’re great in English and okay in French and Spanish (we extract entities but neither facts nor events in these two languages). We intend to implement more languages in the future – but for the time being we’re concentrating our efforts on improved functionality and accuracy in English.

Complexity

OpenCalais isn’t a simple tagging tool. What it returns to the calling application is a reasonably complex RDF construct. It takes a little time to get up to speed on RDF and how to use it in your applications. We think it’s worth it because it’s the most flexible and powerful format we know of.

Performance in Knowledge Domain ‘x’

Where ‘x’ is fashion or square dancing or rugby. OpenCalais is optimized for performance in the general world of business – that’s where we excel.

We have extended OpenCalais to take steps in other areas (such as sports, media, etc.) – but if you need deep semantic extraction capabilities related to protein binding – there are better places to look.

Building syndication buses with FeedAPI & OpenCalais

KristaThomas — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:57:33 -0600

InformationWeek ReviewCam: OpenCalais as 'Semantic Plumbing'

KristaThomas — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:21:04 -0600