Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Auto-tag your content with Calais for Drupal

This is rebooting my interest in automated classification. =)

Check out the Calais Drupal module, based on the Calais service from Thomson-Reuters.
The Calais modules for Drupal (found at http://drupal.org/project/opencalais) are feature-rich, highly intuitive and designed to make it easy for Drupal users to automatically metatag their content, generating rich Semantic metadata that can be shared via a simple key and integrated into the larger content universe.


The screencast shows what an implementation would look like. I'm ready to use Drupal's RSS aggregator or FeedAPI module to pull in some content and see how Calais auto-tagging would work.

Of course, now I want to see what Calais does to library items imported into Drupal, see how Drupal would expose RDF and other stuff!

3 comments:

T Tague said...

Tom Tague from Calais here.

First, thanks for taking note of the Calais Drupal modules.

A couple of points: The screencast is fairly out of date. The functionality of this set of modules has gone well beyond what's shown there.

Second - and more importantly. The Drupal modules for Calais are not a one-off effort. We've made a decision to invest in a long term Drupal effort with our partner Phase2Technology. What you're seeing today is just the start of a series of planned enhancements and new releases.

Jump in and give it a try. We'd love to get feedback at team@opencalais.com.

Regards,

Jano said...

I was a bit dissappointed that the module didn't add normal taxonomy terms; I hoped somehow Calais-suggested terms would become part of Drupal taxonomy (perhaps Calais would automatically build new vocabularies just for its terms) and that those terms would be somehow RDF-enabled (?). It kind of kills interoperability with existing modules (e.g. have RSS feeds of items in those terms, having Solr use those terms as Facets, etc.) but I guess tight integration is a bit out of scope for this module =)

I would also love (if possible) to have some way to specify relationship; that is, I can now add term <-> item relationships with this module, but how would I say "Company X" -> IS AUTHOR -> Drupal node. Maybe I just need to understand this more =)

Alexis Wilke said...

On my end I created MO Auto add terms. It does not include the dictionary, but I found that the other tools generally do not parse the HTML code properly. I'm not saying that my system is perfect but many are using it successfully to improve their SEO and local searchability.