Hi, do you know OpenCalais (http://opencalais.com/)?
OpenCalais provides a web service that annotators the content you send with semantic meta data. This semantic meta data includes for example Entities like Person, Company, City, ... and Events & Facts like Acquisition, Merger, Management Changes, ... For a full list of all available meta data, please refer to the OpenCalais webpage (http://opencalais.mashery.com/page/documentation#extractedsemanticdata). The web service is free for commercial and non-commercial use. Some details about the usage can be found here http://opencalais.mashery.com/Developers. To use the service API you have to create an account and create a license key. This account and license key can be used to access the API. I think this is a great service and I started to implement a UIMA annotator wrapper that calls this service to make the calais meta data available for UIMA applications. I just committed a first prototype of the annotator that annotates person names. To use the annotator you first have to create an OpenCalais account to get the license key. This is mandatory since the annotator has a mandatory configuration parameter that takes the created license key, otherwise it will not work. So we can guarantee that everyone that use the OpenCalaisAnnotator has read the OpenCalais privacy policy (http://opencalais.mashery.com/privacy). Let me know what you think about this? -- Michael
