[uf-discuss] OpenCalais automates microformatting of content

[Jim O'Donnell]

I'm afraid I've got no direct experience of opencalais mself, but the  
Powerhouse Museum in Sydney have been using it to tag their catalogue  
records with people, places and so on. Seb Chan blogged about it in  
March:
http://tinyurl.com/semantictagging
I'm not sure if they carried on with this experiment, but the initial  
examples on Seb's blog seemed impressive.

At this year's Mashed Museum in Leicester, Steve Pope from Eduserve  
also did some interesting stuff running text from online museum  
catalogues through opencalais, which gets a bit of a mention here:
http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2008/06/27/mashed-museum-2008/

Jim

On 8 Sep 2008, at 18:59, Chris Messina wrote:

> I actually stumbled upon this from a Google AdSense link, but there's
> some interesting stuff going on at http://opencalais.com/.
>
> This project was mentioned back in February and at the time, was
> primarily dedicated to adding RDFa output to blog posts. Well, I guess
> they saw the light and now have an API that will add microformats to
> your blog posts, based on semantic analysis:
>
> http://opencalais.com/about
>
> It's being powered/sponsored by Reuters, so you can imagine why
> they're interested in this (basically being able to remine all the
> content they have in all their many news archives and databases).
>
> If you want to get into the good stuff, visit their tools page:
>
> http://opencalais.com/tools
>
> The most interesting projects are:
>
> Calais Marmoset - http://opencalais.com/Crawler
> Tagaroo - http://tagaroo.opencalais.com/ (Alex King's CrowdFavorite
> contributed to this project)
> Gnosis - http://opencalais.com/Gnosis
>
> Now, I haven't really played with the API, and I'm a little wary of
> their actual microformats output, but you can get a sense for what
> they're doing on this page:
>
> http://opencalais.com/Microformats
>
> If anything, I think there's some real promise to this approach and
> love the idea of being able to automatically microformat content as
> it's published to a blog or output from a CMS.
>
> Can anyone take a look at this and give us a sense for how good  
> these tools are?
>
> Chris
>
> -- 
> Chris Messina
> Citizen-Participant &
>  Open Source Advocate-at-Large
> factoryjoe.com # diso-project.org
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Jim O'Donnell
jim at eatyourgreens.org.uk
http://eatyourgreens.org.uk
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