Reuters (News - Alert), the global information company, has announced the release of an open Application Programming Interface (API) for its new Calais Web service.

 

The API provides commercial and non-commercial parties with free access to semantic tagging capabilities to enhance their applications and content. API is available at OpenCalais.com, according to Reuters. 

 

The Calais Web service enables publishers, bloggers and sites to automatically meta tag the people, places, facts and events in their content to increase its search relevance and accessibility on the Web.

 

In addition, the Web service also lets content consumers, such as search engines, news portals, bookmarking services and RSS readers, submit content for automatic semantic meta tagging.

 

Rueters officials explained that the Calais Web service returns content in an open, interoperable and entirely portable format, with a unique identifier that can be easily integrated into social networks, widgets and semantic applications like Powerset, Freebase, Twine, Hakia, Wikia, Blue Organizer and more.

 

Officials also pointed out that Calais is a new Reuters’ initiative that supports the interoperability of content and the development of the Semantic Web -- a layer of contextual intelligence that enables computers to read content, detect connections and also make new ones.

 

Calais, according to officials, leverages Reuters’ substantial investment in semantic technologies and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to offer free metadata generation services, developer tools and an open standard for the generation of semantic content.

 

Noting that the world is still suffering from information overload, Gerry Campbell, president of search and content technologies at Reuters, said in a statement, “Web 2.0 applications have set content free to a great extent, but the explosive distribution of information doesn’t always help users find exactly what they need, when they need it.”

 

“Semantic tagging offers superior sorting and filtering of content for more targeted and timely delivery,” he added. He also said that Calais eliminates the cost of manually creating those tags while giving publishers an effective means of metadata transport.