OpenCalais and the New Content Economy
Bloggers and mainstream media outlets alike are buzzing about OpenCalais, a free Web service from Thomson Reuters, for one simple reason: it helps publishers enhance the value of their content and improve the reader experience on their sites by incorporating state-of-the-art semantic functionality within blogs, content management systems, websites or applications.
As ReadWriteWeb founder and editor in chief, Richard McManus has commented, “we think OpenCalais 4.0 represents an important move forward in the commercial Semantic Web — and we expect to see some big media companies using it before long.”
Why is OpenCalais creating so much buzz , and what's it all about?
Enhancing the value of content is a core value to anyone who wants to build audience loyalty and compete in today’s challenging “attention economy.”
With the upgrade to OpenCalais 4.0, we’re making it easy for publishers to enhance their content with relevant facts and insights from sources like Wikipedia, the CIA World Fact Book, Geonames, and more.
OpenCalais started as a simple tool for tagging the people, places, companies, facts and events in news stories or blog posts, primarily for better search and navigation. One year later, it is becoming a platform that helps publishers compete for readers’ and advertisers’ attention and is processing some two million documents a day.
With version 4.0, we’re giving publishers access to a wealth of open data resources on the Web called the “ Linked Data cloud ,” including a newly available collection of basic business information on publicly traded companies from Thomson Reuters.
Bringing in key facts – such as who competes with a given company or what products a company offers - helps publishers create new connections between people and ideas, and enables them to automatically assemble such engaging features as topic pages, related stories, widgets, and tag clouds.
Publishers can now also use OpenCalais to share a computer-readable summary of key concepts in their content – the entities, facts and events they mention – with next-generation search engines, news aggregators, RSS readers and more.
Intelligent Information from Thomson Reuters
The connections between internal and external content that OpenCalais makes possible are a key part of our ability to deliver Intelligent Information to our customers, and will be essential to the next wave of innovation in digital media, and content and data consumption overall.
Say that every morning you as a consumer want to know which New York state–based companies are in the day’s news in relation to a rumored or real merger or acquisition. You will need to do the research, checking different sources to gather information, and then cross referencing that information on your own.
With OpenCalais – which tags content in a uniform and consistent fashion – computers could do the research for you, combing through and comparing company names, locations and rumored or real transactions real time to give you answers in a way that keyword search simply cannot do.
This valuable capability is a way for Thomson Reuters to deliver more complete news and information resources – as well as more intelligent decision-making tools – to our customers. We named the service “Calais” after the French ferry port that served as Paul Julius Reuter’s continental point of connection when he migrated his news business from carrier pigeons to the telegraph. We see our OpenCalais technology as equally transformative for our business and for the publishing industry as a whole – bridging the gap from today’s Web 2.0 media to the linked content economy of tomorrow.
Try OpenCalais for Yourself
Want to see OpenCalais in action?
- Visit the demonstration page , copy and paste the text of any news article into the demo viewer, and press submit to see OpenCalais automatically tag the content and return a marked-up version.
- The tags appear on the left hand rail, and you can click on the plus (+) sign to see all of the entities, facts and events Calais found in the text.
- Click on the name of a public company on the left hand rail to find an OpenCalais summary page featuring a basic description for that company, as well as a number of links. Follow those links to see the other data entries on that company that are available for public use in the Linked Data Cloud. For example, here is the OpenCalais summary page for IBM :
*Note that the OpenCalais viewer is not the OpenCalais service itself. It is simply a demonstration tool to illustrate how the service works.