ReadWriteWeb

Extractiv has quietly launched a service that crawls the Web for text on a specific topic, then transforms it into "structured semantic data." It's a direct competitor to Thomson Reuters' Calais product, which has been doing this for a couple of years now. This type of service is potentially valuable to media companies, search services and monitoring applications - because it turns messy, unorganized HTML content into data that is organized into categories and given other semantic 'meaning.'

I sat down with Extractiv CEO Shion Deysarkar at the recent Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco, to find out how Extractiv intends to compete with the more well-known and big media backed Calais.

If you've ever believed that semantic search is meant exclusively for researchers, then Meaning Tool might prove you wrong. Through Popego, the semantic search engine allows you to add your online profile and interests such as "gadgets" or "current news". From here, Meaning Tool serves you entertaining content from across your social graph. ReadWriteWeb took a look at how the tool works and how it just might bridge the gap between scholars and social media junkies.

Open Calais, a semantic markup API from Reuters that we've written about on ReadWriteWeb before, has finally gotten the Wordpress plugin it has been looking for since January, when it started a bounty program seeking one. The new plugins come from developer Dan Grossman and represent one of the first public-facing applications of the API (as opposed to private uses like that of the Powerhouse Museum).