nicefishfilms

Along our curious path we have the occasion to converse with some really BIG thinkers. Thinking Out Loud is the raw stream from some of these encounters.

On this edition: Extracting concepts from the real-time net with Open Calais. A conversation with Thomas Tague, Thomson Reuters Calais Initiative Lead and Krista Thomas, Vice President, Marketing and Communications, Open Calais.

You may have noticed that there's a lot of data streaming around the intertubes these days about 'smart data sets.' Google, Yahoo, newcomer Wolfram and other teams are trying to figure out what that web page of yours really means to other humans.

Trying to teach machines how to read concepts was once only fantasy. How do we code understanding of large ideas in a way that IT becomes relevant to the rest of us? One theory is to embed smart data into the headers of each blog post or news articles. This is 'bottom-up' approach is just not going to be widely adopted by bloggers or the general public. One of the barriers beyond the tech-x-pertise is financial. You need a dedicated team inputting rich meta-data into each post - simply out of reach for the rest of us. This leaves the 'top-down' approach of scanning the data and pulling out the 'meaning.' This is exactly what Open Calais is doing- today.






Recently Robert Scoble mentioned Jimmy Wales on FriendFeed which prompted me to search Jimmy. What came back was Jimmy's Wikipedia page (seems fitting since he's the Co-Founder.) What really got my brain excited was the Feedly data overlay powered by Open Calais. As you can see in the picture, Feedly/ Calais was smart enough to read real-time data from Scoble's FriendFeed stream and alert me that Robert was conducting a live interview. I jumped on the phone with Robert and got to engage Mr. Wales with a few questions. Ponder this for a second- I was able to connect with Robert Scoble and Jimmy Wales because Feedly and Calais extracted real-time data from various sources and served up rich information while I was reading the Wikipedia page.







Richard MacManus of Read Write Web has an excellent series of articles on Calais and "Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web". Worth reading if you want to glimpse into OUR future.

To subscribe via iTunes - click here
Want the show via RSS? click here

msw