slowly filling the sea of information
Thursday, May 15th, 2008A quick plug for some just-released software I helped build at Crowd Favorite: tagaroo. It’s an auto-tagging Wordpress plugin that also suggests license-appropriate flickr images. Not too earth-shattering in and of itself, but it’s powered by OpenCalais, which is a really interesting project.
OpenCalais’ goal is to capture semantic relationships gleaned from various digital sources of information. The primary API takes some text, reads it, and gives you back an RDF document with the entities it found in your text — people, places, concepts, and so on — as well as events and facts about them. The RDF model allows these entities to each use any other entity in the Calais database as endpoints in their relationships. The result is a giant and growing semantic information graph, and OpenCalais offers this service for free for both non-commercial and commercial use.
I dig on it. I’m wondering how I can get it working for me in my perpetually-unfinished 3Trace project … The possibilities are enticing.
Currently, Calais’ database is business-and-news-centric, so tagaroo’s auto-tagging feature will be more useful to blogs oriented that way. But if nothing else the UI is a sleek upgrade from Wordpress’s built-in tagging feature. The Flickr integration is sugar.
I think it’s pretty great. It’s the only plugin I’ve seen/worked on so far that I’ve actually installed here. AND — shocker — I MAY even start tagging my posts.