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RSS feedsThomson Reuters has revealed enterprise options for its Open Calais web service. Open Calais sends website content to the service, which scans it for keywords and patterns, and meta-tags it automatically. The service goes beyond simple entity identification, and offers semantic metadata by identifying facts and events in context.
Open Calais was well received at its launch as a step forward for the semantic web, and Thomson Reuters started developing a commercial version.
Barak Pridor, CEO of Thomson Reuters Clear Forest, said: “Multiple content providers asked for a commercial version that would ensure a certain service level, a higher transaction volume and would have an underlying contractual engagement.
“These requirements are quite natural for an entity that wished to bake Open Calais capabilities into a commercial/production offering and served as the trigger for the professional version of Open Calais.”
Pridor described typical applications for the service as newspapers automatically creating tag clouds around different articles to provide a related articles capability, and museums tagging all content describing their artifacts and using the results to offer contextual navigation on their website.
Concerns have been raised about the intellectual property status of the metadata submitted through Open Calais as Thomson Reuters retains a copy of it.
Pridor said: “Thomson Reuters has a non-exclusive, perpetual, sub-licensable, royalty-free licence to that metadata. From a privacy standpoint, our use of this metadata is governed by the terms of the Thomson Reuters and Calais privacy statements. The submitter of the content is free to use the metadata for commercial or non-commercial purposes, under the Open Calais terms of use.”
Thomson Reuters is developing most of the major tools around Open Calais through partnerships such as the Drupal plug-in, developed along with Phase2 Technology, and the Tagaroo Wordpress plug-in.
