Reuters opens up, but what does its OpenCalais service do?
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Not everyone's "got the 'open' memo" just yet, but Reuters apparently has. The global news and information company this week has opened up the API to its OpenCalais project, which enables content creators/aggregators to enrich their content services. What does this mean in English?
That's hard to say, because after reading through the FAQ and the project site, I'm still awash in a muddle of buzzwords and Silicon Valley speak. But what it appears to mean is that it's a Web service that allows someone (even me) to send content (this specific blog, your recipe, a weather report, whatever) to the service to have it (in under a second) attach metadata.
Huh? And? Well...
Maybe this means that it starts connecting the dots (Matt is talking about Reuters, which is a $5 billion information management company; the blog is hosted by CNET Networks, which, according to X source, Reuters once considered buying; Matt was just named the best pie maker on the planet; etc.) and sends it back in this enriched format so that I could then use the metadata to improve site navigation, better organize my content, or whatever.
Few weeks back I wrote
Few weeks back I wrote something on these lines to parse through IDS/IPS signatures, Nessus plugins, Log messages and all other sources that I could collect.
Then my code does some machine learning ( bayesian filters etc ) to find relationships among different events.( think of it as automatic tagging )
So, let's say your machine gets hacked and you put `Netbios` into this system; it would show any IDS, Nessus or Log event with that tag....
duh !! replying to myself ..
duh !! replying to myself .. but calais wont work for security projects because...
The idea behind Calais is simple - identify interesting bits into metadata in documents. In this implementation the focus is on People, Companies, Places, and Events, but surely the technology can be adopted to other entities. The heavy lifting is done by the combination of a natural language processing engine and a massive hard coded, learning database that Clear Forest has built.
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