Tutta colpa di Jeffrey Zeldman:

People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of Scalable Vector Graphics – everything rippling and folding and looking misty – on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource.

Così Zeldman in un suo articolo, critico verso il Web 2.0, riportava le parole di Tim Barners Lee (anno di grazia 2006). Ecco faceva la sua entrata sul proscenio il web 3.0 a partire dal web semantico che Lee aveva già definito con queste parole:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Ebbene il web semantico trova la sua convergenza in un’ Architettura Service Orientednella direzione del web 3.0. E’ il caso di Calais.

We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph – we call our piece of it Calais.

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Finanziato dall’agenzia Reuter e realizzato dal gruppo ClearForest quasi un anno fa, OpenCalais è un progetto di web services in direzione web 3.0.

Ma vediamo cosa fa Calais.
Calais permette, con le proprie API, di ricevere il testo, inizialmente semanticamente non strutturato ma adatto al web, arricchito di metadati. In pieno spirito semantic web, cioè, il sistema restituisce un file RDF contenente tutti i metadati relativi al contenuto che si lancia sotto Calais. Dunque un servizio di supporto  dicevo, caratterizzato dalla possibilità che l’utente ha di creare contnuti col corredo di metadati come valore aggiunto!

The OpenCalais Web Service allows you to automatically annotate your content with rich semantic metadata, including entities such as people and companies and events and facts such as acquisitions and management changes.

The Calais web service automatically attaches rich semantic metadata to the content you submit. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais categorizes and links your document with entities (people, places, organizations, etc.), facts (person “x” works for company “y”), and events (person “z” was appointed chairman of company “y” on date “x”).

Con qualche limitazione:

* The Calais Viewer works with Firefox and Internet Explorer – other browsers may yield unpredictable result.

Con Safari funziona ;-)
Ho inserito la prima parte di questo post:

Con tanto di percentuale di rilevanza del dato visualizzato dai differenti colori di underlines.
Ed ecco il file rdf annesso :

Se sei uno sviluppatore,

Calais is a big initiative with a lot of components. What you care about is the Calais Web Service. The web service is an API that accepts unstructured text (like news articles, blog postings, etc.), processes them using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, and returns RDF-formatted entities, facts and events. It takes about 0.5 to 1.0 second depending on how big a document you send and the size of your pipe. You can send four transactions per second and 40,000 per day. You can use it for commercial and non-commercial applications. The rules are flexible: contact us if you have questions.

Entities are things like people, places, companies, geographies. Facts are relationships like John Doe is the CEO of Acme Corporation. Events are things that happened, like there was a natural disaster of type landslide in place Chula Vista.
The Calais API needs a key. Registered users can have one in about 30 seconds by filling out the API key

Qui trovi la qualche showcase area di quanto è già stato sviluppato.

OpenCalais è ufficialmente parte del Linking Open Data Cloud