Open Calais: Automatic RDF Annotation of Raw Text

OpenCalais: Automatic Knowledge Extraction

Have you tried OpenCalais? It's a web service that automatically annotates raw text with semantic meaning - it generates an RDF file from it. Well, it's still far from perfect, but it obviously has good performance in semantic annotation of your text. Basically, one can copy & paste the text from her blog and get RDF-structured knowledge based on the text. From OpenCalais say they use NLP(Natural Language Processing) techniques to analyze the text and calculate the relevance of the recognized concepts in the text. It can be very useful for web masters, since this approach can be a true time-saver and one of the easiest steps towards automatic knowledge publication. In my opinion, automating the process of semantic annotation of the web documents from one side and presenting the benefits of the Semantic Web to the web masters are the two crucial steps that need to be taken in order to come closer to the true implementation of the Semantic Web itself. These two steps can end the vicious chicken-and-the-egg circle: Webmasters refuse to put extra effort in embedding knowledge into their web pages, since there are no semantic applications that would use that knowledge and make web masters' life easier. But because there is no semantic knowledge, no real semantic applications can be developed. And this circle goes on and on.

With OpenCalais, you can publish your knowledge via API, so new custom applications can arise from your website, blog, wiki, e-commerce page or similar. I admit I still need to read and play with the Calais to explore its full features, but from what I have seen so far it looks excellent. This article does not aim to advertise OpenCalais in any way, nor I am related to it, but I would like to emphasize the importance of its existence as a service, that could be the stepping stone towards unleashing the power of the Semantic Web.

Moreover, OpenCalais has plugins for Wordpress (ohhh, none of them for Blogger :-( ), to automatically generate tags ( Tagaroo ). OpenCalais also can be integrated with Drupal. Seems like a nice application.

I believe that by using this service, the number of semantically annotated pages will rapidly rise. That will make a good ground for development of even more advanced Semantic Applications. Try the video and go to the site, so tell me what do you think.

Here is how applications can be build on top of it:

You can try the OpenCalais Document Viewer, to see how it generates the RDF output.

It only remains to see if OpenCalais will fulfill its glorious mission. I really recommend OpenCalais to the Semantic Web Community, its effort deserves attention