What does the Calais Web Service do?
From a user perspective it’s pretty simple: You hand the Web Service unstructured text (like news articles, blog postings, your term paper, etc.) and it returns semantic metadata in RDF format. What’s happening in the background is a little more complicated. Using natural language processing and machine learning techniques, the Calais Web Service examines your text and locates the entities (people, places, products, etc.), facts (John Doe works for Acme Corporation) and events (Jane Doe was appointed as a Board member of Acme Corporation). Calais then processes the entities, facts and events extracted from the text and returns them to the caller in RDF format. Please also check out the Calais blog and forums to see where Calais is headed. Significant development activities include the ability for downstream content consumers to retrieve previously generated metadata using a Calais-provided GUID, additional input languages, and user-defined processing extensions.
