Competitive Intelligence Marketplace

Reuters Playing Tag

Reuters' launch of their API Open Calais could have an interesting effect on secondary research.  From ReadWriteWeb's article on Open Calais which, by the way, is a nice overview:

The API does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events. This technology is the next generation of the Clear Forest offering, which Reuters acquired last year. We have profiled Clear Forest on ReadWriteWeb and in this post we will look at what Reuters opened up and why...

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.

Need More Metadata

From AlacraBlog:

Worse than not sharing, many other sources of news (and other information) don't tag their content at all.  On Alacra Premium and the Alacra Store there's a high correlation between the quantity and quality of the metadata and the revenue we generate from a given content source.  Knowledge intensive customers subscribe to Factiva and LexisNexis for the consistent tagging as well as the overall aggregation.  At this point, tagging content is not a luxury - it's an absolute necessity.

Taglines - New Folksonomy Tool

Francis Shanahan has launched an experimental site called Taglines that shows you which words are being blogged most about at any given time.

You can get an explanation here.