Open Calais Semantic Web Search Tool

For some reason my brain read that as "Open Calacanis (...)" and I pictured a web search tool site where EVERY result was a link to a page on Mahalo.

Then I woke up screaming.

If you'd like to play around with what the Calais API provides, I've just added support for it on http://apiplayground.org

Paste in the text from a newspaper article, for example, and it'll show you tables of some of the entities that are extracted.

If you're interested in seeing what the back-end that services the API calls looks like (Node.js, so that it doesn't block), take a look here:

http://github.com/jashkenas/api-playground/blob/master/src/a...

First, thanks for building the demo tool!

If you'd like to see the really interesting stuff that OpenCalais extracts head over to http://viewer.opencalais.com. OpenCalais goes well beyond entities and extracts relevant facts and events as well. Entities are just what's in the news - events are what's happening.

I'm using it on http://Newsley.com. I'm particularly interested in building support for the events/facts OpenCalais extracts, but I'm only part way through rebuilding the back end. I'm also really excited to use it along with publicly linked data sets.

Currently, I'm extracting entities that are above a certain relevance threshold for each article. e.g. http://newsley.com/articles/developing-countries-set-to-acco...

It's a great api. You can push 50k articles a day through their system for free. 2 million articles a day is $2000 a month.

Open Calais is already around for some time and evolved greatly. It's especially interesting when you input text about the BP Oil Spill.