OpenCalais: From the Innovators at Thomson Reuters

January 27, 2012

Thomson Reuters is now testing a new print publication called Reuters at the World Economic Forum. Before the firm, returned to print, Thomson Reuters was probing automated tagging.

Founded in 1998, ClearForest was previously an independent software start-up. It was acquired by Reuters in 2007 and is now part of the Markets division of Thomson Reuters. OpenCalais is a strategic initiative from Thomson Reuters, based on ClearForest technology, to support the interoperability of content across the digital landscape.

OpenCalais is free to use in both commercial and non-commercial settings but can only be used on public content. It can process up to 50,000 documents per day (blog posts, news stories, Web pages, etc.) free of charge. For users needing to process more than that, there is Calais Professional. While it does not keep a copy of the content, it does keep a copy of the metadata it extracts. Offering a de-facto standard for making content interoperable in a fashion that complies with Semantic Web standards ultimately benefits Thomson Reuters, which is then able to track themes, memes and trends on the Web and to potentially do things like link to relevant content that helps provide context to its readers, customers and other constituents.

After releasing a couple of major upgrades – in particular the incorporation of a whole Linked Data ecosystem underneath OpenCalais for companies, geographies, products and a few other things – with little or no adoption and no fundamentally new capabilities being built, the OpenCalais team, headed by Tom Tague, decided to slow down development and let the market for semantic extraction mature. Thomson Reuters believes that there are massive opportunities for OpenCalais in the areas of news, its integration with social media and its utilization as a massive repository of knowledge.

OpenCalais’ early adopters include CBS Interactive / CNET, Huffington Post, Slate, Al Jazeera, “The New Republic,” the White House and more. Customers include: Kodak, Dow Chemical, Eastman Chemical, NASD, EDS, Boeing, US Dept. Air Force, Reuters, Dow Jones, Thomson Financial. Competitors include Eqentia and Evri. . (I would not include Concept Searching or Ontoprise in this short list due to exogenous complexity factors.)

Stephen E Arnold, January 27, 2012

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.