Reuters have launched OpenCalais a service that will encourage the development and growth of the Semantic Web.

OpenCalais via kwout

Aimed at developers and information publishers, OpenCalais is web service that can extract meaningful terms from well written text. When fed a newspaper article or business report the service will identify the people, places, monetary values, companies and institutions mentioned and will organize references to those terms to ease further research. In well structured business text Calais can also interpret and classify facts; recognizing and reporting joint ventures, mergers, acquisitions, earnings announcements etc.

End users will not interact with Calais directly, but will access the service through third party applications, plugins and utilities. Development of these will be encouraged through programming bounties, the first offers $5000 for the development of a Wordpress plugin.

In the long term, initiatives like OpenCalais will help us work more effectively with the increasing flow of information that surrounds us. These are distinct strategic and personal benefits to be gained from generating, and being able to work with, structured information instead of being swamped by raw data.