Blogging with Calais
January 23, 2009 2 Comments
The Calais initiative by Thomson Reuters is an excellent example of Semantic Web technologies being smoothly incorporated into common web activities, such as blogging. It uses Natural Language Processing to analyze text and extract named entities (e.g. persons, companies), facts (e.g. employee positions), and events (e.g. mergers, acquisitions).
I have been using Calais in this blog, through the Tagaroo plugin for WordPress. While I type a post, Tagaroo analyzes the text using the Calais web service, and suggests relevant tags and Flickr images. So far, the plugin works very well, without any glitches. Its proposals are usually quite successful and most tags of this blog have been created this way.
Calais can currently analyze texts only in English and French, but more languages are on the way. Let’s hope we see support for Greek soon!
Tom Tague from Calais here.
Thanks for noticing Tagaroo – and great to hear that it’s working well for you.
In the near future we’ll be releasing some great updates to Calais that will be reflected in Tagaroo. In particular we’ll implement topical tagging so that if you write about, for examples, Porsches and Ferrari’s one of the tags that comes back with be “Sports cars” or “Automotive”.
Stay tuned.
Regards
Thanks for the update Tom
Looking forward to new cool features!