OpenCalais

Reuters has opened up a web application to streamline the process of generating metadata around content. From their web site at http://opencalais.mashery.com/Overview

The Calais Web Service

The Calais web service automatically attaches rich semantic metadata to the content you submit – in well under a second. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais categorizes and links your document with entities (people, places, organizations, etc.), facts (person ‘x’ works for company ‘y’), and events (person ‘z’ was appointed chairman of company ‘y’ on date ‘x’). The metadata results are stored centrally and returned to you as industry-standard RDF constructs accompanied by a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID). Using the Calais GUID, any downstream consumer is able to retrieve this metadata via a simple call to Calais.

This metadata gives you the ability to build maps (or graphs or networks) linking documents to people to companies to places to products to events to geographies to … whatever. You can use those maps to improve site navigation, provide contextual syndication, tag and organize your content, create structured folksonomies, filter and de-duplicate news feeds or analyze content to see if it contains what you care about. And, you can share those maps with anyone else in the content ecosystem.

They are also offering bounties for applications to integrate with Calais -- there is currently only one, for Wordpress. See http://opencalais.mashery.com/page/bountyprogram