Agaric looks to get on Calais bandwagon

Despite what Thunderbird thought,

Calais is not the oft-spammed product with a similar name.

It is, instead:

The Calais web service automatically attaches rich semantic metadata to the content you submit – in well under a second. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais categorizes and links your document with entities (people, places, organizations, etc.), facts (person ‘x’ works for company ‘y’), and events (person ‘z’ was appointed chairman of company ‘y’ on date ‘x’). The metadata results are stored centrally and returned to you as industry-standard RDF constructs accompanied by a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID). Using the Calais GUID, any downstream consumer is able to retrieve this metadata via a simple call to Calais.

This metadata gives you the ability to build maps (or graphs or networks) linking documents to people to companies to places to products to events to geographies to … whatever. You can use those maps to improve site navigation, provide contextual syndication, tag and organize your content, create structured folksonomies, filter and de-duplicate news feeds or analyze content to see if it contains what you care about. And, you can share those maps with anyone else in the content ecosystem.

Top Down vs. Bottom Up is No Longer An Issue

Augmenting Calais’ “top down” metadata generation capabilities is our “bottom-up” metadata transport platform. At the time of submitting content to Calais, users may provide their own format-independent metadata for incorporation in the system. This could be XBRL to describe a financial filing, FOAF to describe a social network – or anything else you can think of. This metadata is passed unchanged to any downstream consumer.

In brief, Calais provides automation of rich semantic metadata generation, incorporation of user-developed metadata, transportation of metadata throughout the content ecosystem and extension by allowing users to build new metadata generation capabilities.

The web service is free for commercial and non-commercial use. We’ve sized the initial release to handle millions of requests per day and will scale it as necessary to support our users.

Could Related Content integrate and use this service?