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At the SemTech conference in June I met with William Mougayar, founder and CEO of a semantic news platform called Eqentia. At the time the product was in development, but it is officially launching today. In a nutshell, Eqentia aggregates content into topics using semantic technology. In that respect it is similar to OpenCalais (our coverage) and Evri (our coverage). While all three products have different focuses, each semantically tags and aggregates content in a contextual manner.

The difference, claims Eqentia, is that "with Evri or OpenCalais, the onus is on the programmer." Eqentia says that with its product, "the content is already semanticized and all you have to do is to place it on your portal while preserving your SEO." The other two companies may disagree with that, but let's take a closer look at Eqentia.

The latest implementation of OpenCalais, the Semantic API by media company Thomson Reuters, has just been announced. It's with 'new media' stalwart CNET, which has signed up to use OpenCalais for semantic analysis of its tech product reviews, news, and blog posts. CNET has also joined Thomson Reuters as one of the first commercial media companies to publish its data to the Linked Data community on the Internet. This basically means that external companies can use that data for their own purposes. While CNET won't be releasing all of its commercial data, it will expose certain sets of product and editorial data.