Thomson Reuters has made its first round of 2010 updates to its OpenCalais tools.

In June the company upgraded its service with social tags, which are story descriptors in simple language aimed at helping editors filter news by human interest rather than the standard news categories, such as sports or politics. Now it’s enhancing them in Version 4.3 with more generalized, aggregate tags and with a new feature dubbed News Names. This one hits at the person disambiguation challenge. As it’s described, now when both partial or extended names appear in content, the service will also suggest the most commonly used form of those names.

The OpenCalais blog gives this as an example: “For articles containing Barack Obama, Obama or Barack Hussein Obama, OpenCalais will suggest not only the partial or extended name it found, but also the more frequently used Barack Obama.” The new version also has added new entities, facts and events in English. These now include natural and manmade disaster attributes that reveal disasters’ effects – given the situation in Haiti and the explosive news coverage around it, the timing is quite appropriate for the publishing set OpenCalais aims at. It’s also exapanded its Political Events with new items that include Poll Results and Voting Results. Again, the timing is apt with the swirl of news surrounding the upset election of Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate by Massachusetts voters.

The company also has added to its Tagaroo plug-in for WordPress a couple of minor but helpful features. One lets users click a button when they’re ready to see tag suggetsions, versus getting suggestions automatically (and somewhat disruptively) as they type. Another lets them highlight portions of their text and get tag suggestions for those portions alone in case they don’t want to tag the whole post.

Also on the plug-in front, the Gnosis plug-in — an extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer that brings the semantic metadata generation capabilities of Calais to the browser – has also been updated. The Gnosis plug-in, which automatically and in real time analyzes content as users browse and provides tools to further explore the people, places, companies, and other items they’re reading about, now includes categorizations of processed Web pages in the Sidebar, a power-user feature that provides a constantly updated view of the key information Gnosis has located for the user. It also now can sort entities by alphabetical order or according to frequency or relevance. Currently, Gnosis automatically processes pages from sites including CNN, Google Finance, Wikipedia, Forbes, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Washington Post, Yahoo News, BBC News and Wikipedia.

Last but not least, the OpenCalais Schema has now been published in OWL, opening the door to applying ontology-based tools on OpenCalais metadata. “We had published it before in SDFS, which was sort of entry-level,” says Krista Thomas, Vice President, Marketing & Communications, The OpenCalais Initiative @ Thomson Reuters. “We wanted to publish it in OWL for folks doing a little more advanced work, and it also makes it more flexible/interoperable for them.”

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