Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

U.K.-based vendor Magus is using the OpenCalais service to power its ActiveStandards Aboutness Reports, a semantic reporting toolset that enables companies to monitor and manage the content of their web sites.

The new tool is an addition to Magus’s core managed service of providing web site compliance and quality monitoring services for enterprises’ complex web sites, such as those belonging to massive global companies like Shell and Unilever.

Magus is taking a semantic platform and technology in a direction that so far doesn’t seem to be much on people’s radar, says CEO Simon Lande. The new toolset is a very natural extension of its core technology, which provides auditing capabilities that enable web site best practice standards — for everything from usability to accessibility to logo and font usage — to actually be enforced. Global companies’ sites tend to be managed by multiple people around the world, and while some practices can be defined in content management systems and templates, much of it tends to be impractical or not cost-effective to lock down.

“So people rely on big complex guidelines that no one ever looks at,” Lande says.

The company’s core service provides a way to digitize enterprise web standards, create electronic checkpoints, patrol sites and download content, and then run checks and give editors and managers a dashboard view of areas of noncompliance, why they are in violation and what can be done to address that. As many as 50 checks can be conducted on any particular page on a client web site (for a site with 10,000 pages that’s half a million checks), and the solution works across multiple languages and considers even granular components such as copyright information, headers, footers, and so on.

“For the global web site manager it’s the bird’s eye view of everything that is going on, and for editors working day to day in the content area it’s a dynamic online version of brand and best practice guidelines that gets integrated in the workflow,” he says.

Bringing semantics as an additional feature in the service to help editors know whether they are writing about the right things has been on Magus’ radar for quite some time.

“What prompted us to really start looking at it seriously was the maturing of commercial platforms that became available over the last couple of years, of which OpenCalais is probably the best example,” he says. Magus doesn’t aim to reinvent the wheel, but rather to leverage existing technologies to the benefit of its platform. “We didn’t want to reinvent the semantic platform for coding stuff in RDF and extracting entities, but we can add a lot of value to that. The platform can do the number-crunching and we can take the information and add value to it.”

Each page of a customer’s web presence is run through the OpenCalais engine, which instantly identifies and tags the entities, facts and events mentioned on that web page, creating rich semantic metadata for its content, Magus explains. ActiveStandards then processes the metadata to create reports that enable companies to grasp the “aboutness” of each of their web pages and websites.

Until recently there’s been no easy way to answer questions such as whether information on corporate web sites is accurate, up-to-date, on-brand, on-topic – essentially, how much good visibility you actually have into your content. For example, Magus notes that its clients would never be able to cull together a list of all the people mentioned on their web sites for it to audit whether information about them is accurate.

“Using this technology, the content can all be downloaded, and by determining how a page is written we can extract information that this is person, an organization, a technology or product,” Lande says. “We then can list out all the people on the corporate web site and check that they are valid, are being talked about in the right way and the client doesn’t have to give us any of that information.” That is very powerful, he says, especially when you are talking about products and accuracy around them.

The next phase, Lande says, will build on the framework to help companies understand relationships between entities on their web sites. For example, the U.S. web site may talk about a product in one way while the corporation’s web site in China may do so in a way that is not consistent with that. “The value of the semantic web really comes into use here,” he says. Clear-cut inconsistencies can be red-flagged, while still enabling flexibility for cases where those differences are acceptable, as they might be in the case of language or cultural issues.

The Aboutness Reports are continually generated in the background and accessible whenever individuals log into the dashboard and pull the specific reports they need. “Our responsibility is to patrol the sites for all entities and checkpoints so that any time they log into the system they get updated information,” he says.

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