Auto-Tagging Content with Open CalaisCalais is a free web service from Clearforest, a Reuters company, that can perform semantic analysis on any English text. It uses natural language processing to extract concepts and relationships from the text. It’s been around for a few months, but there’s been very little developer activity around it, and even fewer completed applications using the technology. Not finding any other work to build on, I wrote my own PHP class for extracting tags from content with Open Calais’ API. You can get the source and read more here. This class takes a block of text or HTML, sends it to Open Calais or parsing, and extracts all of the entities (things like peoples’ names, companies, technologies, etc.). It returns a multidimensional array organized by entity type. There’s more Open Calais can do, but I hope this class contributes something to those PHP developers that’d like to start using it but had no place to start with the lightweight documentation and eerily quiet official forums. I plan on putting this class to work as an auto-tagging plugin for WordPress posts. I still need some time to figure out how to integrate that into the new authoring interface of WP 2.5, which this blog is now running on.
Tags: API, Clearforest, fewer completed applications, free web service, HTML, natural language processing, PHP, Reuters
|
Self-promotionRecent Comments
Activity Stream
Popular Posts
|




April 21st, 2008
Dan,
BRILLIANT!
I have been waiting for someone to do this.
Thanks SO much.
Whatever else you can do with it… go for it!
I think OC is one of the new gems of the Semantic Web and I can see it being so useful to Wordpress in various ways.
Thanks for getting the ball rolling
-A
PS. Did you win the money?!
April 21st, 2008
Glad you like it! No, I didn’t enter the bounty program, so I wrote these plugins for free.
June 8th, 2008
I’m using WPMU
I got message error like it..
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /home/XXX/public_html/wp-content/plugins/calais-auto-tagger/opencalais.php on line 17
Hope you can make this plugin compatible with WPmu.
Thx