Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Thomson Reuters' Calais service recently marked its one-year anniversary with the debut of Release 4.0, which touts as one of its main features the ability to automatically integrate content with linked data assets from Wikipedia, DBpedia, GeoNames, the Internet Movie Database, Shopping.com, and more. (Calais is also one of the nominated products in Intranet Journal's Product of the Year competition, where you can now vote.)

Instead of just having the ability to extract semantic data from your own content, that extracted semantic data now will be linked to datasets from dozens of other information sources. Why does that matter? According to a posting in the Calais blog, "you'll be able to develop solutions that leverage a large and rapidly growing information asset: the Linked Data Cloud."

In Thomson Reuters view, the linked data ecosystem is exploding. It comes to that conclusion out of watching the dramatic recent growth of the Linked Data Cloud, says VP of marketing Krista Thomas. "Calais has forged a connection to these linked data assets by following the Linked Data standard," she says.

As the Calais blog explains, among the assets returned when Calais extracts an entity from your text is a Uniform Resource Identifier that links you to Linked Data sites like DBpedia, where structured information is translated into the machine-readable RDF format and accessible via Linked Data standards. A Linked Data entry in a site like DBpedia points to entries in other Linked Data sites.

"The transport layer is 'created' through the process of creating standardized metadata in RDF and returning it to the publisher -- along with a global unique identifier (GUID) -- and then Calais maintains that metadata in the cloud so that the GUID can be used as a key to access that metadata, making the corresponding content available if /when it is relevant," says Thomas.
How does all this interoperability open up new possibilities? Well, now that a Calais entity is automatically connected to the ecosystem of Linked Data assets, publishers can seamlessly create more real-time services, for example. For instance, the blog cites the ability to create a widget for a news site that delivers real-time results of merger or acquisition activity for New York based consulting companies if an article - any one of the thousands of articles that may be published daily -- mentions such activity.

In that case, each article would be submitted to Calais, and, where M&A activity exists, code would direct the retrieval of the Calais Company URI, extract a DBpedia link, send the Linked Data inquiry to DBpedia, and then get a response which, if the CompanyIndustry entity contains 'Consulting' and the CompanyHeadquarters entity contains 'New York,' would get put on the list for the news site widget.

Other news on the LinkedData front comes from OpenLink Software. The company last month said it is loading the entire Linking Open Data cloud into Virtuoso 6.0 Cluster Edition semantic platform. Datasets can be added to a table on the ESW Wiki at http://esw.w3.org/topic/DataSetRDFDumps. The company also began offering ready-to-go Virtuoso-hosted linked open data sets on the Amazon EC2 Cloud platform in December.

Could this be the year that marks a tipping point for Linked Data? Some seem to think so. In a blog posting earlier this month, OpenLink CEO Kingsley Idehen listed his hopes for Linked Data in 2009, noting that 2009 is about a "reboot on a monumental scale. We need new thinking, new technology, new approaches, and new solutions. No matter what route we take, we can't negate the importance of 'Data.' When dealing with organic or inorganic computers systems -- Data is simply everything! The ability of individuals and enterprises to access, mesh, and disseminate data to relevant nodes across public and private networks will ultimately determine the winners and losers in the new frontier, ushered in by 2009."