Content Matters

Reuters has announced the release of Calais, a web service with an open  API.  According to the release, users will be able to use the Calais service at no charge for either commercial or non-commercial purposes.

In conjunction with this, they are creating OpenCalais, an open source community to foster development around the Calais web service.

Calais is a renamed version of the ClearForest technology acquired last year.  The initial launch includes the ability to extract entities such as company, person or industry term along with some basic facts and events, what ClearForest previously packaged as their financial module.

This is the first news we've heard out of ClearForest since the acquisition. Many have wondered what Gerry Campbell's strategy would be for ClearForest.  Reuters is not positioned to sell enterprise software, so it seemed like an odd acquisition. It still seems to me that their primary focus is to leverage the technology internally, though perhaps they are hoping that an open source community may help them establish it as a tagging standard.

In the early days of ClearForest, we had batted around the concept of opening up the rule development platform to an open community as a means of fostering the development of rulebooks extraction modules, though the idea was never pursued.

More details are available on their developer website.