Archive for July, 2014

OpenCalais has always seemed promising – and maybe now is the time to start testing it:

The OpenCalais Web Service automatically creates rich semantic metadata for the content you submit – in well under a second. Using natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and other methods, Calais analyzes your document and finds the entities within it. But, Calais goes well beyond classic entity identification and returns the facts and events hidden within your text as well.

The tags are delivered to you; you can then incorporate them into other applications – for search, news aggregation, blogs, catalogs, you name it.

If you’re not familiar with OpenCalais, the Document Viewer is a way to get a quick peek at OpenCalais output. Paste a chunk of text into the Document Viewer window, submit it, and see the resulting OpenCalais tags. Note that this is not the OpenCalais web service; it is simply a demonstration of what OpenCalais can do.

You can also visit our Showcase for examples of how developers have implemented OpenCalais in a variety of ways.

The metadata gives you the ability to build maps (or graphs or networks) linking documents to people to companies to places to products to events to geographies to… whatever. You can use those maps to improve site navigation, provide contextual syndication, tag and organize your content, create structured folksonomies, filter and de-duplicate news feeds, or analyze content to see if it contains what you care about.

The Tools: A Growing Ecosystem of Calais-Enabled Capabilities

The OpenCalais Web Service is a powerful capability – but using it to deliver value to real people requires applications and the tools to build them. Major focus areas of the Calais initiative are delivering the tools with which to build great applications and fostering the community of developers that will make those applications happen.

To learn more about the growing set of OpenCalais tools please take a moment to visit the Showcase and Documentation sections of the site.

[From How Does Calais Work? | OpenCalais]

Interesting concept

Linked Data in a Nutshell

In a W3C memo that Berners-Lee published in July 2007, he described four principles of Linked Data. The Wikipedia paraphrased it as follows:

Use URIs to identify things that you expose to the Web as resources.
Use HTTP URIs so that people can locate and look up (dereference) these things.
Provide useful information about the resource when its URI is dereferenced.
Include links to other, related URIs in the exposed data as a means of improving information discovery on the Web.
Even that paraphrasing is a bit technical, but we can sum it up like so: Linked Data allows you to discover, connect to, describe, and re-use all kinds of data. It is to data what the World Wide Web was to documents back in the 90’s.

[From Linked Data is Blooming: Why You Should Care – ReadWrite]