While Calais is a general purpose metadata generation tool - where we get personally excited is the idea of its application to news.

We’d encourage anyone interested in the next generation of news to experiment with Calais - but by no means should you stop there. The generation of metadata around a specific article is interesting, but what is significantly more interesting is using that metadata as your passkey into a much larger world of relevant content.

Process an article with Calais, look up the results in Freebase or other machine-accessible sources, look for interesting patterns or linkages and create innovative ways to present all of this to your readers - that’s the challenge.

Regards,

There are schemas created for different types of entities (if you don’t find a schema for your required entity, you can always make one). Like wikipedia, it can be edited by users of the site. The content can be imported and the API can be used to perform entity extraction (using their Metaweb Query Language http://www.freebase.com/view/freebase/api).

It can be a useful source, if the entities you are trying to look for are not present in opencalais database.

One of the people who has written against semantic web (actually metadata) in 2001 was Cory Doctorow in his rather humorous essay, Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia which is available on http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

Heres what Leonard Witt had to say in his article. i’m pasting it off the cache.

CITIZEN JOURNALISTS: They don’t need to be regulated

By Leonard Witt
For the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 12/14/07

As the owner of the URL CitizenJournalism.org, I feel obligated to respond to David Hazinski’s opinion piece Thursday about citizen journalism, in which he wrote: “The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend” (”Unfettered ‘citizen journalism’ too risky, @issue).

He doesn’t think the formerly passive news media audience members are very trustworthy. He adds: “Journalism schools such as mine at the University of Georgia should add courses to certify citizen journalists in proper ethics and procedures, much as volunteer teachers, paramedics and sheriff’s auxiliaries are trained and certified.”

I agree with him that journalism schools should offer training for citizens interested in the news media. In fact, the Department of Communication at Kennesaw State University, in which I teach, is about to introduce a new concentration entitled Journalism and Citizen Media. Although we might offer a Citizen Media certificate, I am far more interested in helping future journalists understand the power of citizen media involvement. I am totally opposed to “monitoring and regulating this new trend.”

For example, mainstream media have been guilty of what Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte of the University of Texas calls “censorship by omission.” The voices of the poor, the disenfranchised and minority groups often go unheard. Now citizen participation is an opportunity to get the disenfranchised heard. Who is going to certify which of those voices is most trustworthy? Will it be the members of the journalism profession, who are 86 percent white and almost 100 percent middle class? I hope not.

You can be a great journalist without formal training. In 1996, former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger did a survey of relatively new journalists and 27 percent said they had never studied journalism.

It gets better. Taking a 10-year slice of the major journalism awards and fellowships winners she found “the majority, sometimes an overwhelming majority” never studied journalism. Here are her findings:

> 59 percent of print journalists who won Pulitzer Prizes never studied journalism;

> 58 percent of journalists awarded Nieman Fellowships never studied journalism, and;

> 51 percent of journalists awarded Knight Fellowships at Stanford University never studied journalism.

Citizen journalism, which goes by many names including networked journalism, We Media, distributed journalism and open-source journalism, is a direct outgrowth of the open-source software movement, which Eric Raymond wrote about in his book “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” The cathedral is the old top-down model and the bazaar is the almost out-of-control street market model. Much to his surprise and almost everyone else’s, the chaotic bazaar model produced better and more rigorous software than the rigid top-down model. In the end, this open bazaar form of citizen-created journalism will produce a better informed public and a more rigorous public square.

Models will be formed, just as they were in the open-source software movement, which will filter out the crackpots, vandals and incompetents and it will happen without a certification board. It will not be professional journalism pitted against citizen journalism, it will be a combination of both, and that’s what I will be teaching my students. In other words, I will be teaching them about inclusion rather than exclusion and about freedom of speech and the power of the free press even if that press is a blog owned by a solitary individual publishing to the world.

> Leonard Witt holds the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University.

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:RX1mf2vGSaMJ:www.ajc.com/opinion/content/printedition/2007/12/14/witted1214.html+Citizen+journalists:+They+don‘t+need+to+be+regulate&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us