The OpenCalais Web Service & Open API

Tom TagueOpenCalais Initiative Lead

Introducing OpenCalais

• A Thomson Reuters initiative to connect all the world’s business-relevant content.

• A free service that brings new efficiencies and productivity to publishers and content curators.

• The fastest, easiest way to categorize your content, and tag the entities, facts and events therein.

• Progress since Feb., 2008:

• 30,000 developers• 50+ publishers using OpenCalais• 75+ cool new apps and services created• 5+ million documents per day processed

Free Metadata Generation1. You feed your content into our

extraction engine

2. It categorizes the stories; finds the people, places, companies, facts and events, and then returns that metadata to you

3. Along with the metadata, it returns links to free data on the open Web (i.e. Wikipedia, CIA World Fact book, IMDB, etc.)

4. You use the metadata to streamline content ops, enhance your content, create topic hubs on the fly, improve search, etc.

Live Demo: http://viewer.opencalais.com

1. Cut and paste a business news story into the viewer, and hit submit.

2. View the semantic markup (hover over underlined items to see relevance, for instance).

3. Expand the extracted entities, facts and events on the left hand rail.

4. Click on one of the companies in the list on the left, to view the OpenCalais / Thomson Reuters asset on that company in the Linked Data cloud.

5. Click the ‘SameAs’ links at the bottom to find more data on the Linked Data cloud.

NEW!

NEW!

How Metadata Connects You to the Open Web

The Linked Data Cloud – December, 2008

Linked Data Cloud as of July, 2009

Unstructured Text

Unstructured Text

Calais extracts entities,

facts and events

Calais extracts entities,

facts and events

Metadata returned to

the user with keys

Metadata returned to

the user with keys

Keys provide

access to the Calais

Linked Data cloud

Keys provide

access to the Calais

Linked Data cloud

Which provides information and

other Linked Data pointers

Which provides information and

other Linked Data pointers

To a range of open and partner Linked

data assets, including Thomson

Reuters

To a range of open and partner Linked

data assets, including Thomson

Reuters

11

22

33

44

55

66

Your Content & The OpenCalais Process

OpenCalais Mainstream Adoption

Publishers are using OpenCalais to:

Get Efficient

• Streamline content ops to drive editorial productivity

• Automatically categorize content with both IPTC news codes & ‘social tags’ that use everyday terms

• Automatically tag the people, places, companies, facts & events in content

• Automatically integrate archived materials

Get Engaged

• Improve search & navigation to make it easy for readers to find what they want.

• Automatically populate recommendation widgets & related stories sidebars

• Automatically create ‘topic hubs’ on trending issues & breaking news

• Automatically integrate relevant data, related media, information from Wikipedia entries, etc.

Get Smart

• Optimize search engine ranking through better SEO.

• Inform advertising placement and drive click-through

• Improve syndication to search engines, news aggregators, ‘recommended reading’ apps., etc.

Get Specialized

• Triage content based on local relevance & impact

• Triage content based on preferences or behaviors

• Triage content based on topic, industry, special interests, perspective, etc.

Using OpenCalais to:

• Aggregate & organize content in new ways.

• Automatically produce topic-based sites.

• Improve search functionality.

• Generate better content recommendations.

• Publish product reviews, news articles & blog posts for programmatic use on the open Web

Case Study: Content Ops & Topic Hubs

Using OpenCalais to

• Improve ad placement, connecting partners & advertisers with relevant, quality content.

• Achieve deeper classification & categorization within its library of 1.7 million pieces of content.

• Assign the right story to the right writer at the right time, based on expertise, breaking trends, what’s hot, etc.

Case Study: Optimizing Ad Placement

Using OpenCalais to:

• Produce regional microsites that ‘super-serve’ communities with relevant news (Chicago, LA, etc.).

• Perform content ‘triage,’ routing the right story to the right section & the right readers.

• Automate content ops & drive editorial productivity.

Case Study: Localization

Case Study: a new content experience

Feedly is a Firefox plug-in brings to life user-selected content feeds in an easy-to-read and engaging magazine-style format.

It uses OpenCalais & other semantic technolgies for:

• Automated tagging and linking on the back-end

• Clustering and organizing on the front-end

Case Study: Do it all

Using OpenPublish, a semantically enabled CMS to:

• Contain costs: Streamline content operations & increase editorial productivity

• Increase Engagement: Offering faceted search, recommended reading sidebars, topic hubs and more

• Improve distribution: optimize search engine placement with more accurate, complete metatagging

• Innovate: intelligently “mashup” content to create new products, repurpose content for display in new ways

Using OpenCalais to

• Automate content tagging

• Improve search engine position / ranking

• Drive more readers to the site

Case Study: Optimizing SEO

Using OpenCalais to:

• Achieve a new level of personalization for readers based on what they actually read

• Provide other publishers with the same capability via its Newstogram service

• Drive incremental revenue, charging publishers $0.02 per Newstogram API call.

Case Study: Personalization

Also… it’s a good thing: Investigative journalism

FOIA:Con-tracts

Calais Web Service

Company:PersonFamilyRelation

News Calais Web Service

Company:ContractCompany:Affiliation

Big Fuzzy Graph

DocumentCloud – Open Access to Source Materials

• Started by reporters from The New York Times and ProPublica

• Two dozen publishers and industry assoc. contributing materials

• Beta by the end of the year

Calais Tagaroo is for bloggers on the WordPress.org platform

Calais Marmoset creates metadata for Yahoo! Search Monkey & Google Rich Snippets

Free Tools

Give SemanticProxy.com the address of a web page.

Get back rich semantic metadata about the people, companies, concepts, facts, events and relationships on that page.

The Calais Collection of modules makes it easy for Drupal users to get started with OpenCalais.

OpenPublish is a complete OpenCalais-powered publishing suite based on the popular open source platform Drupal. Visit; http://www.OpenSourceOpenMinds.com/OpenPublish.

Free Tools