ClearForest SWS

It’s been a long time since our last SWS post and I wanted to take a moment to bring you up to date on SWS as well as to introduce our new initiative: Calais.

SWS has been an extremely successful experiment in deploying a subset of the ClearForest semantic metadata extraction capabilities to the world as a whole. We’ve had dozens of mashups built on top of SWS and have thousands of active users of Gnosis - the SWS based Firefox plugin.

Since the time we released SWS and Gnosis ClearForest has been acquired by Reuters. This is a great opportunity for us and has allowed us to deploy the ClearForest technologies against some of the most complex information management challenges in the world.

It has also given us the opportunity to take SWS to the next level. Several weeks ago we announced Calais. Calais is, like SWS, a web service that exposes the ClearForest technology to the world - but it goes well beyond the capabilities of SWS. A few key differences:

• Calais offers not just entity - but event and fact extraction
• Calais offers a wider range of entity extractions
• Calais delivers results in RDF - the standard for semantic metadata generation
• Calais can handle millions to tens of millions of transactions per day
• Calais is available for commercial and non-commercial use - for free

Our plan is to continue to support SWS for the reasonable future - at least for the next year or so. However, if you are developing new applications or significantly enhancing your existing application you should definitely utilize the Calais service.

Please visit www.opencalais.com to learn more.

Fyi: A couple of write-ups on Calais.

ReadWriteWeb - Reuters Wants the World to be Tagged

eBiquity

Techdirt

CNET

We recently had extended periods of downtime during the period of 7/13 to 7/14. As usual after anything breaks - we don’t expect that thing to break again. Our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused to our users.

Drop by sws.clearforest.com and pick up your copy of the new and improved Gnosis Firefox extension. The new release has a much cleaner user interaface and features automated processing of top news sites such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune and others. Gnosis also automatically processes Wikipedia in real time as you read - adding a whole new level of exploration potential to the site.

We’ve also released a desktop version of SWS that allows you to automatically process a folder of text document and receive back a folder of XML results. See the “Try SWS” section for details.