Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

For the last few months, the Thomson Reuters “Reuters Labs” initiative has been quietly moving forward with Spotlight, an open developer community that provides non-commercial developers with free access to Reuters multimedia articles, pictures, videos and text news via a set of API services.

Now, it is bringing the community out into the, well, spotlight, with news of some applications and mashups on the experimental developer initiative, which features integration with the Open Calais web service, which automatically creates rich semantic metadata.

Basically, the service works like this. Developers sign up for the service and get an API key to access Reuters’ rich news content or metadata about the content via standards-based feeds. You can build content feed URLs or metadata feed URLs using a number of parameters that determine the format of the feed, including country from which the content is sourced and format (Atom, RSS, Media RSS, JSON and Serialized PHP, etc.). Optionally, developers can select to have a semantically marked version of the content in an RDF format, which uses the Open Calais service to automatically extract entities from within the content and give meaning and relationships in the form of metadata to the content.

Andrew Lister, head of labs development, says about 500 developers have signed up so far. The gallery of applications is small so far — under ten — but he expects that to grow as developers learn that’s a way to generate interest in their work. Among the existing applications are GIST, created by Thomson Reuters developer Todd Faulls using Spotlight and Calais. It offers a visual display of news filtered by people, places and things that combines related stories, images and video clips. The integration with Calais creates an understanding of popular items (for instance, a lot of Obama or Britney Spears tagging) and enables prioritization and navigation of related stories to give the reader a fuller view of a story and the trends around it.

Another service is a Spotlight/Daylife/Calais mashup that runs on a touch screen device that explores the forms of presenting news content to help readers select and process news; it is predicated on the idea that a design system has to be able to comprehend content in some degree to appropriately present it, and uses natural language processing to provide insight into each new item’s specific content and structure.

“News is a fascinating piece of content. It changes all the time. People and places are always moving,” Lister says. “I think news is a really good piece of content to try things out with the semantic web.” Its very un-static nature challenges the ability to continually create, refine, and relate data sources, and build upon that intelligence.

He says he sees a lot of innovation happening with Gist-like applications. “If a lot of people have much the same ideas at the same time, then probably you going to end up with quite a good idea,” he says. “People are quite interested by what they can do with the semantic web and what extras it gives them.”

Spotlight, Lister emphasizes, isn’t just about putting news up on a blog site — there are widgits for that. “This,” he says, “is for people who want to build some ideas.”

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