The Calais Initiative is almost one month old, and they've already received a large and welcoming response from the development community (1,113 early adopters)! When they weren't busy doing interviews or answering hundreds of emails and forum posts, they were coming up with ways to help spread the technology. They will soon be releasing a Wordpress plugin, followed by plugins for Drupal, Plone and other content management systems. They also express that Calais is not only good for named entity extraction, but can extract other facts from documents. An example they give is "what technologies are associated with what company in a document?" Good luck, Calais team!

True Knowledge is a natural language search engine and question answering site, but to leave it at that would not do the site justice. What makes it stand out from similar sounding services like Powerset and Freebase? True Knowledge tackles natural language search and question answering (much like Powerset and Hakia), and it also maintains a knowledge base of facts about the world (similar to DBpedia and Freebase). However, what makes True Knowledge stand out is that they've combined these features and encourage their userbase to contribute facts and add new knowledge.

Continue reading True Knowledge: The Natural Language Question Answering Wikipedia for Facts

A lot of you emailed me asking where to find more videos, so I'm delivering the goods. I've expanded the previous list from a paltry 17 to a remarkable 302, and I've included podcasts this time! There were so many videos I had to break them up into different categories for easier skimming. There are no duplicates, however I did place some videos into more than one category when I felt it was appropriate. This list is monstrous, enjoy.

Continue reading 302 Semantic Web Videos and Podcasts!

I've been hard at work on updating Semantic Focus, both from an articles standpoint as well as adding new features. Although larger, more hush-hush projects (Semantic Web/NLP related) loom on the horizon, I'd like to share with you a few changes you may have noticed around the blog, and how they are especially of benefit to our guest writers and other members of the Blogosphere.

Continue reading Semantic Focus Community Update (18-Feb-2008)

To all my fellow Python enthusiasts, Ivan Herman (with the help of new programmers from the CTIC Foundation in Spain) has released a new version of his SPARQL wrapper for Python. The wrapper creates the query URI for you and will convert the results to RDF/XML and JSON, if possible. Keep up the excellent work guys, we can never have enough Semantic Web libs for Python!

Update: 302 Semantic Web Videos and Podcasts!

I've compiled a list of videos about the Semantic Web, RDF, and OWL for your viewing pleasure! Most of these videos are short, ranging from about 6 to 10 minutes while others are long (45+ minutes). Included are a few introductions, a few interviews, and a few that get into the gritty details.

Continue reading 17 Semantic Web, RDF, and OWL Videos

11 months ago I posted a short entry that posed the question of whether the world needed a metadata extraction service. I stated that the service could quickly become the largest repository of metadata (in the form of named entites and facts) on the Web if it stored the resulting metadata from each request. Open Calais seems to me to be the "metadata extraction service" I had in mind; it's is a Web service that allows you to automatically annotate content and extract information like facts and named entities (people, places, and organizations, and much more) from unstructured text. If that weren't enough of a good thing, Open Calais returns the metadata in RDF.

Although the question of whether we need it still hasn't been answered, I believe this service could be a catalyst for change towards Semantic Web standards if it is integrated into (or used to create plugins for) the multitudes of open source blogs and other CMS software. Open Calais opens the door to the possibility of lowering the barrier enough for everyday users to publish semantic content.

The Web as we know it today is an ecosystem of people, documents, machines, and an exponentially increasing amount of unstructured information. Everyone is free to change the landscape of the Web, and millions of us (people, that is) have taken our crack at it, shaping it how we see fit. This generally entails creating our own Web sites, but anyone contributing in any way is actively changing the way the Web is structured. Changes to the Web's structure will only become more obvious and pervasive as we approach the full-scale vision of the Semantic Web.

Continue reading The Fault-Tolerant Semantic Web

Open Calais - a new and smart API from Reuters - finally does what critics say to be the greatest obstacle to the Semantic Web: Taking the metadata burden from the end-user by providing an automatic meta-tagging tool. The principle behind Open Calais is easy: Put in some unstructured text and get in return nicely structured RDF-data. Backed by powerful Text Mining and machine learning techniques the API automatically detects entities like persons, events, countries and other facts.

Open Calais takes account of the fact that the added value of content is hidden in its structure. Uncovering that structure and representing it in a interoperable format makes existing resources more programmable and reusable.

But what is in for Reuters? Nothing less than the biggest structured content repository on the web. Should not we talk about this little fact as well?

While I am still waiting for an invitation from Twine (probably you too?) I have received one from Powerset - natural language search. Powerset obviously is a promising company (and is promising a lot), so I was excited when I was starting to play around with this new tool which still isn't available for the public.

Continue reading Natural Language Search - A New Breakthrough?