Pioneering Partners Include Moreover Technologies, Morris Communications, Magus Ltd. and Prefix Technologies

SemTech 2010 – San Francisco, Calif. – June 24, 2010 – Thomson Reuters today cited four innovative companies that are pioneering the large-scale and commercial use of its OpenCalais service to enrich and optimize digital content. They include Moreover Technologies, a world-leading media aggregation and monitoring provider; Morris Communications, a top-tier regional publisher; Magus Ltd., the British pioneer of enterprise website governance, and Prefix, South Africa’s leading Content Management System (CMS).

“Two and a half years in, we are extremely pleased to be part of leading publishing platforms and media monitoring solutions around the world,” said Tom Tague, OpenCalais Initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. “We’re processing five million documents per day and storing 90 billion triples, which may well be the world’s largest collection of structured facts and events. It reflects a growing percentage of the English language news articles, blog posts and social media status updates posted every day.”

Joining CBS Interactive / CNET, Huffington Post, The New Republic, The Nation and more than 50 other publishers, entrepreneurs and service providers using OpenCalais are:

Moreover Technologies. One of the original news aggregators on the Web, Moreover provides companies with “news and views” in a comprehensive solution for business intelligence, mainstream media and social media monitoring. It aggregates, refines and delivers millions of daily articles, blog posts and social media updates from more than a million editorially vetted sources spanning 800 searchable industries in 100-plus countries, and 50-plus languages.

Moreover Technologies uses OpenCalais to categorize and tag news and blog content as well as social media status updates to provide superior mainstream and social media monitoring services to clients of all kinds.

"Equally important to quantity of information is quality," said Paul Farrell, President of Moreover Technologies. “It’s imperative to be able to retrieve rapidly the most relevant and pinpointed results possible from vast repositories of business intelligence. Our partnership with OpenCalais substantially enhances our ability to make sure clients get the right results at the right time.”

Morris Communications. A leading southeastern media company, Morris Communications has newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising, radio, book publishing and online properties. Its digital arm, Morris DigitalWorks, turned to OpenCalais while digitizing the archives of its 13 daily newspapers, including the Augusta Chronicle; the Florida Times-Union; the Savannah Morning News; the noted local Journalism experiment Bluffton Today and more.

"We strive to be unrivaled in the delivery of local news and information to our readership in every possible medium. So it is essential to be able to repurpose our content for any number of uses – including digital distribution on the Web, mobile, etc.,” said Michael Romaner, President, Morris DigitalWorks. “OpenCalais has helped us achieve that mission in two ways. By improving the relevancy of our content for Web searches, we have increased both our overall page-views from search engines, and our retention of those readers once they arrive. We look forward to expanding on this successful alliance."

Magus Ltd.Magus Ltd.  Magus is the pioneering UK company behind ActiveStandards™: the market-leading SaaS platform for enterprise website governance used by Unilever, Shell, Philips, ING and more. ActiveStandards takes web content governance to a new level by enabling companies to coordinate the policies, processes and people that underpin their web presence within a single integrated framework, and monitor and manage compliance.

Magus uses OpenCalais to power ActiveStandards’ “Content Insight Reports” – a suite of powerful semantic reports which extend the reach of online governance by providing visibility and control over unstructured content.

“Semantic Web technologies are revolutionizing the way people find and use information online,” said Simon Lande, CEO, Magus Ltd. “Our alliance with OpenCalais enables us to leverage this technology to bring about a step-change in the way that companies monitor and manage their online content. We see it as a revolution in content governance.”

Prefix Technologies. Provider of South Africa’s most popular off- and online CMS, Prefix is a trusted Web-applications development company. Prefix solutions enable magazine, newspaper and online publishers to collect, store, share and monetize content in new ways that increase competitive advantage while improving efficiency and reducing costs.

Prefix uses OpenCalais as a processing layer for Preditor’s Semantic Tagging Engine. With a powerful tagging rules toolkit on a per-magazine basis, Preditor customers with multiple magazines on Preditor are able to draw content out of their archives and build smart links across a the network for their readers. In one case study, they’ve scanned through and linked over 10 years of archives.

“We’ve seen significant increases in archive monetization for our customers with our OpenCalais implementation. Equally, it’s been incredible to explore new ideas in both the print and digital worlds to create content packages through semantic discovery,” said Josh Adler, CEO, Prefix. “We feel we’ve interpreted the semantic opportunity in a unique way for traditional media and OpenCalais opened that door for us."

About the OpenCalais Initiative
The OpenCalais initiative supports the interoperability of content and advances Thomson Reuters mission to deliver intelligent information by connecting all the world’s business-relevant content. It offers free metadata generation services, developer tools and an automatic connection to the Linked Data cloud.  Found at OpenCalais.com (http://www.OpenCalais.com), OpenCalais is the fastest, easiest and most accurate way to tag the people, places, companies, facts and events in content to increase its value, accessibility and interoperability on the Web.  For a quick and easy demo of how OpenCalais can add intelligence to your content, visit http://viewer.opencalsis.com, paste in a news story and hit submit."

About Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters is the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, healthcare and science and media markets, powered by the world's most trusted news organization. With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters employs 55,000 people and operates in over 100 countries. For more information, go to thomsonreuters.com.

Announcing Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco 2012

Semantic Tech & Business Conference is returning to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

MODERATOR:
Greg Stuart, gregstuart.com

PANELISTS:
Keith DeWeese, Tribune Company-Tribune Interactive
Evan Sandhaus, New York Times Company
Paul Berry, HuffingtonPost.com
Jim Stanley, CBS Interactive – Technology & News
Michael S. Dunn, Hearst Interactive Media

This discussion features representatives from major media companies who are seriously investigating or presently using semantic technologies in their sites. The conversation will focus on the business and operational benefits of using semantic technologies in publishing and media sites.

Publishers Panel from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.

Pioneering Publishers Tap Semantic Web Service to Speed Editorial Processes, Improve the Reader Experience and Extend Their Reach Across the New Content Economy

New OpenCalais ‘Archive Express’ Service Debuts to Help Other Publishers Get Started; Free Service Tags Large Content Archives in 24 Hours

San Jose, Calif. – The 5th Annual Semantic Technology Conference – June 16, 2009 – Following on the news of its alliance with CNET, Thomson Reuters today announced that The Huffington Post, DailyMe and UK-based Associated Newspapers Ltd.’s Mail Online have integrated the OpenCalais service into their popular news sites and services.

These pioneering publishers join Thomson Reuters and CNET in ushering in a new wave of innovation in digital media and online publishing. They are using OpenCalais to achieve new efficiencies in content operations and editorial processes, speeding the delivery of breaking news to readers. They are also using OpenCalais to reach new milestones in localization, personalization and search engine optimization (SEO).

“OpenCalais enables our editors to more efficiently locate related local stories,” said Paul Berry, CTO, The Huffington Post. “This helps the site meet an important strategic goal: cost-effectively producing regional microsites that ‘super-serve’ communities with the best local news, as we have done in Chicago.”

OpenCalais helps publishers compete. Found at OpenCalais.com, the free service makes it easy to automate content operations, enhance the value of content, improve the reader experience and extend distribution to new search engines, news aggregators and social media applications.

"OpenCalais helps us to create a picture of a user’s behavior and interests, so that we can personalize the news for them," said Neil Budde, President and Chief Product Officer, DailyMe. “That capability has enabled us to add automated personalization features that both improve our readers’ experience and help optimize ad targeting for our partners.”

Today also marked the debut of Thomson Reuters new OpenCalais ‘Archive Express’ service, which can tag an archive of up to 20 million documents in 24 hours time.

“Tagging archived content is a simple way to get started with OpenCalais, and the fastest way to give old stories new life,” said Thomas Tague, OpenCalais Initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. “It can help publishers repurpose – and even drive incremental revenue from – historical content, and makes it easy to bring archived stories into ‘related stories’ applications, ‘recommended reading’ widgets and more.”

OpenCalais uses natural language processing (NLP) to “read” an article, extracting the ‘who, what, when, where and how’ from the story. Breaking content down into its basic elements makes it easier to manipulate – automating the creation of topic hubs and microsites – and improves its search relevance.

"OpenCalais was originally part of a suite of data mining and SEO solutions we assembled for Mail Online, and our intention was to use it to ‘Sanity Check’ the rest,” said Simon Schnieders, SEO Manager for Associated Newspapers’ Mail Online, “It speaks volumes for the service that we came to rely on OpenCalais for entity extraction."

Thomson Reuters OpenCalais initiative is committed to helping publishers improve their online business results. With OpenCalais, publishers can:

• Automate: Automatically tag the entities, facts and events in content to increase its value.
• Enhance: Enrich content with open data from Wikipedia, Shopping.com, Geonames and more.
• Engage: Optimize the user experience, increase engagement and drive repeat visits.
• Extend: Increase reach to new search engines, aggregators, ‘related stories’ apps and more.
• Connect: Compete in tomorrow’s media ecosystem of enriched and interconnected content

Note to attendees of the 5th Annual Semantic Technology Conference: Thomas Tague is a keynote speaker this morning at SemTech; he takes the stage at 8:30 a.m. PT.

Learn more about how CNET and The Huffington Post are using OpenCalais in the SemTech 2009 Publisher Panel with Jim Stanley, Vice President – Products, CBS Interactive – Technology & News; Paul Berry, CTO, The Huffington Post and more. It takes place today at 2 p.m. PT.

The OpenCalais Archive Express service is available today. With shipping, users can expect their archive to be received, tagged and returned to them within one week. Please contact Professional at OpenCalais.com to get started.