OpenCalais and Tagaroo
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
Information tagging is not not a new concept and in social media it is very common place. Effective tagging of content can be both tricky and time consuming and in some cases subjective. It is also a real pain to do if you have a lot of content which needs tagging but hasn’t been tagged from the start, unfortunately this blog falls into that category. Clearly there is a problem here which is begging to be solved! And of course it has been solved, well at least there is a service which is attempting to solve the problem.
OpenCalais is a new service offering from Thomas Reuters which in their words:
…automatically creates rich semantic metadata for the content you submit – in well under a second. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais analyzes your document and finds the entities within it…
In simpler terms it analyses your writing and proposes tags which are suitable for the information. This simplifies things for you as you don’t need to think up tags, tags become consistent and overall just easier to apply.
Sounds fantastic, and it is, you just need to be able to integrate the service into your content generation software. This blog is a fine example of content generation software, powered by Wordpress and with a tagging mechanism already built into it. All that is needed is to take the tagging mechanism and integrate it with the OpenCalais service. Step forward Tagaroo, a plug-in available for Wordpress which does exactly this.
With a little technical knowledge I was able to install this plug-in to our blog in under 15 minutes, and bingo, it was up and running. Less than another 15 minutes later I had tagged the last 25 posts that had been written with the help of Tagaroo. Still work to be done of course but the process has been made considerably easier!
Tagaroo doesn’t stop there either, the plugin also takes the suggested tags and performs a search against flickr to suggest images tagged similarly to your content, instant visual context. Ok actually here I didn’t find the images as relevant but I like the feature concept!
Overall a fantastic service and a fantastic plug-in. And of course this post has been tagged with the assistance of Tagaroo.