New Release of OpenCalais
August 12, 2012
OpenCalais gets a new release … soon. It has not come out as of this writing, but Calais’s blog announces that “A New OpenCalais Release On the Way.” It sounds like an upgrade that any site covering current events should be looking forward to. The post describes the enhancements:
“On the user-facing side of the equation you’ll see a number of new entities, facts and events related primarily to politics and intra and international conflict. Doesn’t look like either of those will be going away soon – so we thought they were worth implementing. You’ll see new information in candidates, Party Affiliations, Arms Purchases and a number of others.
“In addition to these new items, we’ve also enhanced our SocialTags feature for greater accuracy – in fact, you’ll see a number of accuracy improvements across the board.”
For those unfamiliar with the OpenCalais Web Service, it is a nifty free tool (“powered by” Thomson Reuters) that automatically incorporates semantic metadata into content. The best way to see what it does is to past a chunk of text, any text, into their Document Viewer. The tool will tease out and insert links for topics, social tags, entities (like organizations or industry terms), and events & facts. After you’ve played with that, check out the examples of ways the technology has been implemented on the Showcase page.
It is acceptable to use OpenCalais for commercial purposes, as long as users abide by the Terms of Use, but a Calais Professional version is also available for power users.
Cynthia Murrell, August 12, 2012
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