Business information provider Thomson Reuters, US, has announced the launch of Calais 4.0, a free web service and open application programming interface (API). The tool is projected to make it easy for publishers to enhance the value of their content, improve the reader experience and connect to the emerging linked content economy.
Found at OpenCalais.com, the service claims to be the fastest, easiest and most accurate way to tag the people, places, companies, facts and events in content to increase its value, accessibility and interoperability on the web. It goes beyond metatagging to help publishers automatically integrate their content with linked data and open web assets from online sources such as Wikipedia, DBpedia, GeoNames, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and Shopping.com. Calais 4.0 also makes it easy for publishers to share rich semantic metadata about their content with such content consumers as search engines, news aggregators, and 'related stories' recommendation services.
The Linked Data cloud is observed to be a valuable and rapidly growing public information asset. Just as an editor might link to a Wikipedia entry to provide readers with background or context, publishers can use Linked Data assets to define - and provide reference data for - the key concepts in their content in a language that computers and databases can read. With Calais 4.0, publishers can leverage these assets to dramatically enhance their content at no incremental cost. In keeping with its commitment to the Linked Data standard, Thomson Reuters has also made a set of public business data assets available for use on the web. The collection is seen to represent the first contribution to the Linked Data cloud made by a major publisher.
With the latest release, Thomson Reuters is also publishing the Calais schema in the industry standard resource description framework schema (RDFS). This will enable developers to access to a growing toolkit of schema-aware tools to work with Calais' metadata output.
