New Metatagging Service

Which Came First?


Reuters is now offering a new open source API content-tagging system called Calais Web Service. With this new service comes the flexibility of automatic metatagging content and developing semantic applications.

Calais works through natural language to locate content for metatagging. This generation comes from the acquisition of the vendor Clear Forest. The opening of this new tool is in the spirit of extending and increasing the number of tools out their by getting more developers in using the semantic applications are not used very much.

To promote this Rueters is offering a prize, a kind of carrot on a stick to get the ball rolling:

Bounties will be awarded for the development of specific capabilities that Reuters would like to provide to Calais users. The first announced bounty of $5,000 will be awarded to the developer who creates a configurable plug-in for WordPress that will enrich blogs with tag auto-suggestion, a semantic cloud, and a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID). The second program, details of which will be announced later in February, will be a series of contests. "The bounties and contests are there to drive interest," [says Tom Tegue, Reuters’ chief evangelist for the Calais project.] "The challenge is to take a technical tool and make it relevant for real people. Developers are one in a thousand. In order to make the technology relevant, smart people have to translate it into applications."

Part of what spurs this program is the irony of semantic technology. While there is very little demand for development the talented designers stay away. It leaves it floating in a kind of stasis.
Gerry Campbell, who has spent time working for AOL Search and AltaVista, joined Reuters in 2006 as president of the search and content technologies group and headed up the initiative that led to the creation of the Calais Web service. "The world is still suffering from information overload," says Campbell.

Of course it remains to be seen how much this will generate interest. Campbell hopes that encouraging development will solve what he calls the "chicken and egg" dilemma of the semantic web. The conundrum plays out as follows: Publishers don’t use semantic tagging because of the dearth of tools available, and developers don’t create tools because semantic technology isn’t widely used.

Any Thoughts?

Here is a link to the story:

http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=40881