Reuters and the Semantic Web
The idea of the Reuters Calais semantic web service is upload free text content to a web service, and receive back that content enhanced with embedded RDF. So, for example, let’s say you’re content includes the fragment:
… it will be possible to exchange tolar banknotes (unlimited) and coins (until 2016) only at the Bank of Slovenia.
The service will recognize “Bank of Slovenia” and send back the RDF, complete with a URI for the resource in question:
<rdf:Description
rdf:about="http://d.opencalais.com/comphash-1/65c45759-512c-3044-a47f-f74d42f14f4e">
<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://s.opencalais.com/1/type/em/e/Company"/>
<c:name>Bank of Slovenia</c:name>
</rdf:Description>
From what I can tell, the service can only recognize the objects of description; it can’t identify relations. But certainly this is a nice start, and even nicer to see it’s free, and that they’re putting up a $5000 bounty to encourage a practical implementation in WordPress. Would also be nice if they could explore sending back to the content as RDFa-enhanced XHTML (or maybe OpenDocument 1.2 once it’s released and its metadata functionality is implemented).
