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.

At its heart, Eqentia is an aggregation platform. It promotes itself as "an aggregator of context, not just content." The way it does this is to add context in the navigation. Each portal has its own taxonomy, which Mougayar described as "a bit like a hierarchical tagging structure." He said that "we basically wrap any content with a semantic wrapper."

How it Works

Under the hood, Eqentia does "content harvesting" from social media sites such as Twitter, blogs and more. Currently Eqentia is getting content from over 13,000 feeds, collecting an estimated 65,000 articles daily.

Eqentia told us that it's indexed 20 million articles so far. The largest topic currently is Outsourcing, with 90,000 articles. Other topics include: Cloud Computing: 60,000; Supply Chain Management: 40,000; Twitter: 20,000; Social Media: 11,000.

Eqentia then does "text mining and filtering" and the results are run through an "Aggregation Engine" (which has rules for sources and filters). Finally there is what Eqentia calls "Semantics Management" - including entity extractions, taxonomy definition, controlled vocabulary.

What The User Gets

Eqentia is starting off with a focus on "professional" content topics. It will target business and technology content, ignoring more mainstream topics like current affairs, sports, entertainment.

Eqentia is launching with 3 products:

1) Out-of-the-box portals. These will give general users free access to topic streams (of which there are 12 at launch, with more coming). There will be email options, widgets and RSS feeds available.

2) Personalized portal. These can be private or public. [note: this is what ReadWriteWeb has signed up for]

3) Enterprise. A SaaS platform that can be customized. A stated use case is for large companies to "disseminate organized news intelligence for their employees across distinct groups or market segments."

Conclusion: Tough Competition, But Important Market

The proof will be in the pudding as to how Eqentia compares to OpenCalais and Evri. We've been very impressed with both OpenCalais and Evri in our previous coverage, so Eqentia has high standards to live up to. In particular Eqentia is going to have to nail the User Experience, because it is relying on its interface a lot to give value to the user.

Finally, Mougayar noted to us that "if web 2.0/social media rewarded the socially savvy user, the semantic web/web 3.0 will reward the research oriented user." It's a nice marketing line, but we are apt to agree that products like Eqentia, OpenCalais and Evri are bringing much needed smarts to the oceans of content in the Web.

We spoke today with Peter Offringa, Vice President of Software Engineering at CNET, to find out how CNET has implemented OpenCalais.

The ways that CNET will use OpenCalais are twofold:

1) It will use OpenCalais to power 'topic pages' across CNET web properties. For example in the screenshots below, the word 'Zune' is linked and when clicked it leads to a topic page about the Zune.

Peter Offringa told us that currently CNET has a limited set of topic pages and that they were built in a "semi-automated way" - by which he means that the tags are automated using OpenCalais, but the topic pages are powered by RSS feeds and those need to be manually set up. However the tag generation is an automated process integrated within CNET's publishing system.

CNET articles will include links to topic pages, e.g. Zune link above

Example topic page, largely powered by OpenCalais

How this works is that OpenCalais enables semantic analysis of CNET's content, from which it creates tags that then help power the topic pages. Peter Offringa told us that CNET plans to scale up its topic pages, as well as doing more 'recommender' features in the near future using OpenCalais - perhaps replacing the current recommendation widget on its pages powered by Sphere.

2) The second part of the announcement today is that CNET is publishing some of its commercial data to the Linked Data cloud, which they will do in the RDF format. Offringa said that this will be primarily product data, but will also include other types of data - e.g. from their software download services. While Offringa told us that CNET is "not going to expose everything", they will contribute a "base set of data" to the Linked Data ecosystem.

CNET also plans to mix this data with external Linked Data sets. In the above Zune example, they may add company data from Thomson Reuters. It's this cross-linking of "content verticals" (in this case, within tech news) that will lead to interesting things in the Linked Data world.

Disclosure: OpenCalais is a sponsor of ReadWriteWeb and we are also working on a similar project with them.