Read/Write Web has a good blog post on a new service from Reuters called Calais, which is one of the first real world enablers of the semantic web I have seen.
What’s the Semantic Web? The guy given credit for inventing the internet, Tim Berners-Lee, explains:
I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize. [quoted in Weaving the Web by Mark Fischett (1999)]
The new Reuters Calais has an API to which you can submit unstructured web documents and it will tag (or index) these documents in a useful and intelligent way–by Relations, Organizations, Industry Terms, Company, Person, Country, and City.
Read this interesting Read/Write Web post “Reuters Wants the World to be Tagged” to find out more.
