Money Talks-Is the Semantic Web About to Get Real?

BlueSalamander writes: Tim O'Reilly just did an interview with the CEO-designate of Reuters at the Money:Tech conference. With no great enthusiasm I started to read yet another interview on how the semantic web was going to make everything great for everybody. As you'd expect Wenig was lucid and talked a very good game about semantic technologies empowering the world and Reuters as well. Wenig made some great points about the end of the latency wars in news and the beginning of the battle for automatically detecting linkages and connections in the news. Smart news — not just fast news. Great stuff — but another talking head? Nope — a little searching revealed that Reuters just opened access to their corporate semantic technology jewels. For free. For anyone. Their Calais API lets you turn unstructured text into a formal RDF graph in about one second. I ran about 5,000 documents through it and played with a subset of them in RDF-Gravity. The results were impressive overall — though there is a clear performance advantage for business news. Is this the start of the semantic web getting real? When big names and big money start to act, not just talk, it may be time to pay attention. Semantic applications anyone? The foundation appears to be here.