Looking for Experience in Open Calais
The folks at Thomson Reuters have a service named Open Calais that preforms entity identification and creates semantic meta data. It's definitely worth watching. The service creates the RDF tags for web pages, xml documents, and text. Marking-up the web is one of the necessary steps to make the web 'understandable' by machines. While the service is not always complete, nor is it always accurate, in what it tags it is a nice step forward. You can check out the entity identification here or here. The second link is to the Semantic Proxy which allows for the programmatic calling of the Calais service via and API.
There are a handful of apps in the Calais gallery that use the service. One of my early favorites is LinkedFacts.com. That said, after a bit of investigating I am left with a 'so what' feeling. OK the LinkedFacts service has highlighted companies, people, dates/events and enables me to find more information on the web about those 'things' via its overlay UI. So what? I can't really tell how or why the additional 'Yahoo News', for example, was suggested to me. Would the same information be suggested to my mom, wife or kids if they were to use the service? I've rambled on about "what's right for me? or What should somebody like me do in situation xyz" here.
This cool yet flat experience with LinkedFacts reaffirms my thesis that discovering, scoring, and providing access to experiences and justified beliefs (i.e. knowledge) is where money may be made on the web. Needless to say, it will be interesting to watch the apps evolve in the Calais gallery. My hunch is that until beliefs/experiences join the named entities, facts, and events in the Calais identification engine the apps will continue to be cool but a bit flat.
