OpenCalais for Creating Semantic Metadata

Last fall on October 15, 2010, before even thinking about Twitter, I began looking at OpenCalais (www.opencalais.com and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCalais). When supplied natural language content, Open Calais Web Service automatically processes it and generates semantic metadata--entities, facts and events derived from the "raw" data, such as from a website. It uses technology from ClearForest (www.clearforest.com and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearForest).

In other words, with OpenCalais, we have the ability to create semantic meaning of use to us. To illustrate how it works, the OpenCalais site supplies a document viewer at http://viewer.opencalais.com/. When you paste content into the text field and click 'Submit', you get semantic metadata:

Clicking on 'Show RDF' gives us useful RDF XML data that we can further process for whatever we want to do with it (for instance, with XSLT--as described at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT).

Eventually, on October 15, 2010, I downloaded the ClearForest Gnosis add-on (for Internet Explorer) from the OpenCalais site. (After getting a free OpenCalais user account.) This tool automatically applies the same semantic generation as above on a website that you are browsing! I brought up the Gnosis Toolbar (at the left of the browser). And then I applied it to the Wikipedia page for the movie Inception. Notice the classes that were created. And note what comes up when I expanded 'Movie':

You can download Gnosis at http://www.opencalais.com/Gnosis. It is amazing!