The OpenCalais Web Service & Open API

Krista Thomas

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:• 18,000 developers• 20+ publishers using OpenCalais• 50+ cool new apps and services created• 4+ 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

8

OpenCalais mainstream adoption

9

• Aggregate & organize content in new ways.

• Automatically produce topic-based sites.

• Improve search functionality.

• Generate better content recommendations.

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

Early Adopters

• Content Triage

• Hyper-local news

• Contextual Ad Placement

New Publishers to tap OpenCalais include• The New Republic: The new TNR.com uses OpenPublish, an

OpenCalais-enabled Drupal-powered CMS to increase editorial productivity & drive reader engagement.

• Al Jazeera English’s new blogging network: uses OpenCalais for content operations & tagging; features Al Jazeeracorrespondents from around the world.

• Slate Magazine’s News Dots Network: visualizes the most recent topics in the news as a concise network of related topics.

• I *heart* Sea: a hyper-local news aggregation site that collects some of the best blogs in Seattle, especially those serving the Capitol Hill area.

Media Monitoring and Intelligence Tools• Meltwater: a rapidly growing SaaS-based provider in the Corporate IR

& PR Services

• Tattler (app): an open source topic monitoring tool for today's Web. Tattler finds and aggregates content from the Web on topics users ask it to monitor.

• Interceder: a social media monitoring tool that makes it easy to track trending topics and search the latest content from major news Web sites, blogs, Twitter and YouTube.

• AskJot: a tool for analyzing web pages for keywords, and displaying them as links to search results from services around the Web.

New Content Experiences / Open Research• Feedly: a Firefox plug-in that brings user-selected inputs from Google

Reader, Twitter, RSS feeds, etc. in an easy-to-read magazine-style format.

• OpenPublish: a new CMS based on Drupal that integrates OpenCalais from the ground up, OpenPublish is tailored to the needs of today's online publishers & media providers.

• DocumentCloud: founded by reporters from The NYT and ProPublica, and funded by the Knight Foundation, DocumentCloud will offer public access to news reporters’ original source materials.

• MediaCloud:an open research tool from Harvard’s Berkman Center that aggregates mainstream media and blogs to enable researchers to identify how and where news coverage starts, what we’re missing, etc.

Why Thomson Reuters Cares

• Its mission is to connect all the world’s business-relevant content to provide professionals with ‘intelligent information.’

• The days of survivingas a ‘walled garden’ of content are over.

• ‘Crowdsourcing’ Q&A creates faster, better,stronger software.