CBS/CNET Announce Adoption of OpenCalais
Jinfo Blog

28th May 2009

By Nancy Davis Kho

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Today ThomsonReuters and CNET announced that they have formed an alliance to join the power of semantic analysis with digital media and publishing. According to the release, "Under the agreement, CNET will use the Thomson Reuters OpenCalais service for semantic analysis of its tech product reviews, award-winning news, and blog postings on consumer electronics and technology. This service will help streamline CNET’s content operations, drive audience engagement, and further extend CNET’s reach across the Web." http://digbig.com/4ythc OpenCalais is a free service from Thomson designed to simplify automated content operations, improve the reader experience and extend distribution to new search engines, news aggregators and social media applications. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais analyzes documents and finds the entities within it. OpenCalais then leverages its connection to the 'Linked Data Cloud' to link those entities to related people, products, maps, companies and more, helping return the facts and events hidden within the text. The announcement signals CNET's role as one of the first commercial media companies to make core data assets like its tech product reviews, news articles and blog posts available for public, programmatic use on the open semantic Web. In a time when newsrooms are having to do more with less, the use of semantic analysis and tagging will make CNET's rich content more meaningful and discoverable, without requiring a passel of extra resources. It's also a move that enables CNET to mix and mingle its data resources with those of other publishers more easily, upping the chances that their interoperable content will be used to create new media resources. That's the real promise of the Linked Data Cloud , the standard advanced by Tim Berners-Lee to expose, share, and connect data on the Web. When big players like CNET start seeing the light of Linked Data, expect other smaller publishers to at least give it a second look.

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