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Posted on October 13, 2008October 13, 2008 by deadprogrammer

Semantic Web

Deadprogrammer.com is one step closer to the brave new world of the semantic web. Over the weekend I implemented Open Calais, an auto-tagging service from Reuters.

Being lazy, I haven’t tagged my content very well, and now, faced with with over a thousand posts, hand-tagging them is not something that I have the time for. I thought about creating a tagging interface and asking my readers to contribute to a folksonomy, but it would probably result in two valid tags and a million “viaggggrrarr” and “vikkoddinn” ones – spammers try to enter a lot of tags for some reason.

Calais is a neat web service. In a nutshell, you pass it the text of your posts and it returns an xml document containing tags in various categories. The set of categories is huge: RadioStation, MedicalTreatment, Movie, City, Person are just some of them. Unfortunately I did not set everything up correctly, and some of the more interesting categories did not get populated as I was indexing the old posts.

Meanwhile, my posts are a bit better tagged now, and you can take a look at a tag cloud of people and cities mentioned in my blog.

CategoriesMetablogging TagsCalais, Collective intelligence, Data, Folksonomy, Information, Knowledge representation, Metadata, neat web service, Reuters, semantic web, Tag, Web 2.0, World Wide Web, XML

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