OpenCalaisTransparent Text

Sep 21, 2009

Things I Don’t Have to Talk About

• There’s lots of text in the world

• Most of the world’s knowledge is in text

• You should stop ignoring it

• If you’re going to work with text it needs structure

Today

• Going to cover three things

– The text problem in one slide

– What is OpenCalais? What does it do?

– A few examples of how people are and could use it

• Sorry – no pretty visualizations

The Text Problem (aka Why OpenCalais?)

• Target areas where:– The economics

don’t support metadata creation

– The value of metadata is potentially high

– The value of aggregated metadata is potentially extremely high

Seco

nds

Year

s

Seconds

Years

Tweets

New Gen

News

Legacy News

Scient. Pubs

Great Novels

Latency

Sh

elf

Lif

e

OpenCalais…

• OpenCalais extracts smart metadata from unstructured text and links that metadata to the Linked Data cloud.

Calais progress to date

• Launched in late January, 2008

• 15,000+ developers have joined OpenCalais.com

• 3-5 million content transactions per day

• Delivered six major update releases

• Free (as in free) for commercial or non-commercial use

OpenCalais 101

John Doe, the CEO of Acme Corporation, announced today the appointment of Jane Doe as the company’s Chief Financial Officer.

Entities

Person {John Doe}

Person {Jane Doe}

Company {Acme Corp}

Person {John Doe}

Person {Jane Doe}

Company {Acme Corp}

Facts

Person:Position

{Person: John Doe}

{Position: CEO}

{Company: Acme Corp}

Person:Position

{Person: John Doe}

{Position: CEO}

{Company: Acme Corp}

Events

JobChange

{Person: JaneDoe}

{Position: CFO}

{Company: Acme Corp}

{Status: Entering}

JobChange

{Person: JaneDoe}

{Position: CFO}

{Company: Acme Corp}

{Status: Entering}

Category

Business Finance 97%Business Finance 97%

Unstructured Text

Unstructured Text

Calais extracts

entities, facts and events

Calais extracts

entities, facts and events

Metadata returned to

the user with keys

Metadata returned to

the user with keys

Keys provide

access to the Calais

Linked Data cloud

Keys provide

access to the Calais

Linked Data cloud

Which provides information and

other Linked Data pointers

Which provides information and

other Linked Data pointers

To a range of open and partner Linked

data assets, including Thomson

Reuters

To a range of open and partner Linked

data assets, including Thomson

Reuters

11

22

33

44

55

66

Quick Demo

How is OpenCalais Being Used Today?

Triage – aka Improving the SNR

OpenCalais Rules

Unification of Diverse Content Assets

News1

OpenCalaisCommon Coding / Ontology

Press Releases

News2

Give me documents where “John Doe” is

mentioned in relationship to an M&A event

Event Stream Analysis

Text Stream (News, etc)

AnalysisOpenCalais

Investigative Networks

Government Contract

Documents

Birth, Death, Wedding &

News

Person:PersonPerson:CompanyBusinessAlliance

Person

PersonPerson:Person

Person:CompanyBusinessAlliance

FamilyRelation

OpenCalais OpenCalais