Reu­ters released the API for their Cal­ais web ser­vice last week. I dabbled with it quickly last week, and then was reminded about it earlier today. I took a closer look and come away very impressed and thought­ful about the applic­a­tion of this tech­no­logy. Cal­ais accepts text and quickly extracts a vari­ety of meta data about your con­tent or as they phrase it : “auto­mat­ic­ally annot­ates your con­tent with rich semantic metadata.” Cur­rently it attempts to determ­ine ref­er­ences to:

• Entit­ies: city, com­pany, con­tin­ent, coun­try, industryTerm, MoneyAmount, Organ­iz­a­tion, Per­son, Province­Or­State, Region and URL;
• Events/Facts: acquis­i­tion, alli­ance, bank­ruptcy, busi­ness­Rela­tion, buy­backs, com­panyEarn­ing­sAn­nouce­ment, com­panyEarn­ings­Guid­ance, com­pa­ny­In­vest­ments, compantLeg­alIs­sues, jointVen­ture, Man­age­mentChange, mer­ger, per­son­Polit­ical, per­son­Polit­ic­al­Past, Per­son­Pro­fes­sion, Per­son­Pro­fes­sion­al­Past, stockSplit

This is a rather rich col­lec­tion of metadata — and they tar­get expand­ing from here. Read the rest of this entry »