HighTechCville

Thanks to Ed Summers at the Library of Congress for his post on SemanticProxy. Semantic proxy offers a dead simple API for feeding URL’s to the OpenCalais entity extraction engine.

For those of you not familar with OpenCalais, it is a “rules” based Entity Extraction engine that knows how to find in free form text certain bits of information, like the name of a person. OpenCalais is sponsored by Thomson Reuters, so most of the rules are based around the text you would find in a newspaper. Like “GM is in talks with Chrysler for a merger” would give you the companies GM and Chrysler, as well as relationship called “merger_talks” between the two.

I was hoping to use OpenCalais to extract place, time, and subject information for all those free form event announcements. Unfortunately OpenCalais doesn’t have the rules to pull that type of entity out. It does find on the people listed in an event, but that’s it.

However, I did fine it very useful to find more people information for HTC. A new group in Charlottesville called FirstWednesdays has started, and their “Find Me” page in the comments has a wealth of data. I am just splitting up the DOM on each comment, and feeding each one to OpenCalais and getting back a person and a couple of relevant links. It’s working great.

So between SemanticProxy for pages of raw content and using OpenCalais for specific chunks of text I expect to simplify the process of adding new data to HighTechCville.