Alchemy from Raw Text to Semantic Annotations

Alchemy API, a free web API that can be used to semantically annotate web resources such as HTML documents or pure raw texts. The  Alchemy API, uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) to extract the meaning of the input text. Alchemy is capable of retrieving entities, keywords, pure text txtraction, text categorization, language identification and probably some other features that I haven't explored yet. The response of the API is ordinary XML ( RDF included here as well ), which of course, is easy to parse and integrate with any platform. Unlike OpenCalais, which offers typical SOAP web service( which is also a tehcnology I personally admire, you can read my post about it), Orchestr8's Alchemy API uses web requests to their server to invoke their NLP technology. The API is well documented, with downloadable examples for a variety of technologies. Since I am ASP.NET developer, I only downloaded the C#.NET SDK examples and it seems really neat and simple to use. It is very probable that other SDK's are as good as the mentioned one. Please note that you would need  an API key before using this service. This Orchestr8's API, in my opinion bears a lot of potential in dramatically decreasing the effort for semantic annotation of world's web content, which is most likely the stepping stone for the real semantic evolution. An interesting thing that I noticed in the Alchemy's response is that actually contains some kind of entity alignment in it. For instance, it is capable of disambiguation of a given term, so  in the RDF response there is an OWL ontology alignment piece( powered by LinkedData I suppose ), that aligns the disambiguated entity with semantic resources from sources like DBPedia, Freebase, CIA Factbook,GeoNames etc. Really cool. That could boost semantic knowledge management in even more advanced semantic applications.

Orchestr8 offers the API in several packages. The basic package is free and allows 30 000 calls per day, which, is enough for small to medium applications. If a good idea for a semantic web application is born, this certainly will not be the limit.