WeLoveLocal Archive

Teams with Publishers and Providers to Deliver Easy-to-Use Applications:

• The Calais Tagaroo PlugIn for the WordPress Blogging Platform
• Three Calais Modules for the Drupal Publishing Platform
• The Calais Marmoset Toolkit for Yahoo! Search’s New SearchMonkey Developer Platform

The SemTech 2008 Conference – San Jose, CA – May 19, 2008 – In response to developer and industry demand, Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI; TSX: TRI; LSE: TRIL: NASDAQ: TRIN), the world’s leading provider of intelligent information, has delivered significant upgrades to its Calais Web Service and debuted a range of new Calais capabilities.

Found at OpenCalais.com, Calais gives publishers and developers free, open access to automatic metatagging capabilities that increase the relevance and search accessibility of their content on the Web.

Calais version 2.0 features a dozen new semantic entity types, improving its utility for pop-culture publishers and bloggers covering media, music, entertainment and sports, as well as those covering pharmaceuticals, medicine and healthcare. It also adds code samples and libraries for accessing Calais, as well as two new output types – the Simple Tags format and Microformats – alongside the standard Resource Description Framework (RDF) option.

In addition, Calais 2.0 marks the debut of Thomson Reuters’ breakthrough Calais Marmoset toolkit. Calais Marmoset is a simple yet powerful tool that makes it easy for publishers to generate and embed metadata in their content in preparation for Yahoo! Search’s new open developer platform, SearchMonkey, as well as other metacrawlers and semantic applications. To learn more about the Calais Marmoset tool, go to OpenCalais.com/Tools.

"We are humbled and gratified that more than 3,200 developers have joined the Calais community to work with the service, share ideas and help prioritize the development of our new features," said Thomas Tague, Calais evangelist and project lead, Thomson Reuters. "We are also thrilled to provide bloggers and publishers of all sizes with new Calais plugins and modules that make it easy to kick-start metatagging and enter the era of the Semantic Web."

Today, the company also debuted the Calais Tagaroo plugin (http://tagaroo.opencalais.com) for the WordPress Publishing platform. The Calais Tagaroo plugin makes it easy for WordPress bloggers to tag the people, places, facts and events in their blog posts – and add relevant photos from Flickr – to increase their blogs’ visual appeal and accessibility on the Web. Tagaroo works in the background while bloggers write, automatically generating tags and finding related photos for selection, sizing and insertion via an easy-to-use interface.

In related news, Thomson Reuters teamed with Phase2Technology to create three Calais modules for integration with Drupal, an increasingly popular open source content management platform that supports a variety of Web sites, from blogs to large publishers and interactive communities. The Calais modules for Drupal make it easy for Drupal users to automatically tag their content, generating rich semantic meta-data that can be shared via a simple key for integration into the larger content universe.

Finally, the Calais Web site has been re-launched and redesigned to reflect the new Thomson Reuters brand architecture, and to support a dramatic upgrade in Calais community features. These include robust and interactive forum services, interest groups, advanced search and navigation as well as a host of other design and interaction features. Registered Calais users will not need to re-register for the site or Calais services.

About Calais

The Calais initiative supports the interoperability of content and advances Thomson Reuters’ mission to deliver pervasive intelligent information. It leverages the company’s substantial investment in semantic technologies and Natural Language Processing to offer free metadata generation services, developer tools and an open standard for the generation of semantic content. For more information or to get started with the Calais API, please visit OpenCalais.com (www.OpenCalais.com).

About Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. The company combines industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, scientific, healthcare 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 more than 50,000 people in 93 countries. Thomson Reuters shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: TRI); Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: TRI); London Stock Exchange (LSE: TRIL); and Nasdaq (NASDAQ: TRIN). For more information, go to www.thomsonreuters.com.

Media Contact:
Krista Thomas
Thomson Reuters
+1 415 202 3523
Krista.Thomas@ThomsonReuters.com

Editor’s note: The views expressed in this post may not necessarily represent the views of CenterNetworks. This press release was paid for and provided in its entirety by Thomson Reuters.

A new local reviews site has launched in London. Called "welovelocal" it offers similar functionality to Yelp in the States. It has an absolute Web 2.0 feel to it and all of the edges, both design and functionality, are well done. The site offers users a way to find local businesses and read real user reviews as well.

You can also create a profile and a friends network which helps to show you trusted reviews. Each review has a lot of information about the business. I did note in the video that it would be great if the phone number was clickable to Skype perhpas and if the Tube information clicked over to the Tfl transit planner. A Google map is included to locate the business.

What's also groovy is that if you are the business owner, you can update the details and add more information about your business. Yelp has something similar but WLL seems to offer the ability for more detailed information.

Check out my video review below and leave your thoughts in the comments: