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OpenCalais: Opportunity to Visualize?

I just read about the OpenCalais project from Thomson Reuters.   The company describes it as:

Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application.

What I interpret is that they are creating a hub for semantic data sources, so that all the formats and all the semantic options become increasingly accessible for developers.  My hypothesis is that Thomson Reuters is aware that people will also want to buy data about the people, relationships and companies they access through OpenCalais and that they will be able to sell it to them.

There’s a couple intro videos–with especially well-done animations it’s worth mentioning–on their website.   (Embedded below…)

There are two visualization projects in their community so far.  One called Thinkpedia, using ThinkMap to visualize Wikipedia relationships and another called Wirecatch to visualize business relationships found in news stories.

Email me if you have any thoughts about how to put Calais to use.

3 Responses to “OpenCalais: Opportunity to Visualize?”

  1. Tom Tague says:

    Thanks for mentioning OpenCalais. Building networks is what OpenCalais is all about – so I think there’s a great opportunity for integration here.

    If you’d like another example – check out Slate Magazines News Dots – also powered by OpenCalais.

    http://slatest.slate.com/features/news_dots/default.htm

  2. Team Jute says:

    News Dots is pretty cool. I like that they built it on Flare. Jeff Heer, the guy at Stanford who developed Prefuse also did that…he does some amazing work.

    We’re very interested in OpenCalais. I’d like to learn more about how partners monetize the service…

  3. Team Jute says:

    Why doesn’t News Dots show up in the Showcase? Did I just miss it? I searched for “visualization” and only found Thinkpedia and Wirecatch.

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