Ron Miller
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

OpenCalais, a semantic web service from Thomson-Reuters, has announced a deal to integrate OpenCalais into the Oracle Database 11g Release 2, giving Oracle customers programmatic access to the OpenCalais metatagging service.

Semantics With a Real Business Twist

Tom Tague, head of the OpenCalais initiative at Thomson Reuters, says this agreement really cements semantic technology as a business tool. “There is a lot of talk about the Semantic Web and semantics, and arguing about whether it’s academic or real,” Tague said. “This is a big stamp that it’s real. Oracle builds things for business.”

Indeed, Xavier Lopez, who is director, Spatial & Semantic Technologies, Oracle Server Technologies, says Oracle is calling this ability to semantically tag information ‘semantic document indexing.’

“This integration between OpenCalais tagging service and the Oracle Database allows application developers to quickly and easily generate a large repository of semantically rich metadata to support knowledge discovery,” he said.

The semantic technology features are part of Oracle Spatial, an option for Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition, which includes native support for semantic standards including RDF/RDFS/OWL/SKOS. “This semantic data store enables application developers to benefit from an open, scalable, secure, integrated, efficient platform for RDF and OWL-based applications,” Lopez explained.

How it Works

Lopez says this integration has broad implications for database developers using Oracle Database 11g Release 2. “This access [to OpenCalais technology] allows developers to quickly and efficiently build scalable and secure metadata content repositories supporting a new generation of text mining and knowledge discovery solutions,” he said.

In particular, Lopez said, “Oracle has introduced a database function that identifies unstructured documents stored in the database, file system, or on the network. It then uses a Web service connection to call out to the OpenCalais service, which extracts metadata from the document and then incorporates the extracted information, captured as a set of RDF triples for each document, into the Oracle semantic data store.”

Oracle and OpenCalais in Action

Tague says combining these two technologies takes a static database and transforms it into something that can interact with external data in ways that just weren’t possible before. He says part of the motivation for this agreement with Oracle was to provide a link between highly structured data assets and this whole world of unstructured content–the web and the linked data ecosystem. “Those two worlds don’t talk well. You can put and article in an Oracle database, but can’t do much with it,” he said.

“If I have a database, and it has stock prices and company names, I can run queries such as ‘What company had biggest stock price change.’ That’s not real exciting,” he says, but if you take the same database with OpenCalais running, he explains, and you add a business news feed, suddenly as the news comes in, OpenCalais generates metadata about each company, and places the information next to the appropriate company in the database. This enables Oracle users to do much more complex and interesting and queries such as ‘What was the percentage of price change for companies with a management change over the last month?’ or ‘Show me the price changes for semiconductor companies that have legal issues versus those that don’t.’

This information gives you the ability to ask much more subtle questions. “Suddenly anything that was news is now data and I can use it and tie it back to structured data,” Tague said.

OpenCalais on the Open Web

This partnership with Oracle is just one way that companies are using OpenCalais technology. They are working with many publishers, who are taking advantage of the technology to use it in interesting ways — companies like Dailyme.com (which we reported on last month in an article by Jenny Zaino). Tague says since launching January 2008, they have continued to grow and develop the product, and are currently processing between 3 million and 5 million documents per day. Some 15,000 developers have signed up to use the service.

OpenCalais has been able to develop a service that puts real semantic processing within reach of publishers as small as the individual blogger. The partnership with Oracle takes the service to another level by providing ways to build applications on top of Oracle in an enterprise. And as Tague says, that takes semantics out of the realm of the theoretical and places it squarely in the midst of a business setting.

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