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.

Oct 12, 2009 | Categories: Blog, Data Visualization, Software Industry | Tags: business network visualization, opencalais, relationship visualization, social network analysis, Social Network Visualization, thinkmap, thinkpedia, thomson reuters, wirecatch | 3 Comments »