biais.org

OpenCalais is a free web service that can perform semantic analysis on any English text. It processes the text sent in your request and respond with extracted concepts and relationships. It's a great tool if you want to play with semantics and if you want to add some nice features to your website / blog.

As an example, I tried to send the text from a this small article about Ruby and Python. Note : For readability I kept only interesting data from the response :

<!-- 
Relations: 
ProgrammingLanguage: Python, Ruby
--> 
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:c="http://s.opencalais.com/1/pred/">
  <rdf:Description rdf:about="...">
    <!-- ProgrammingLanguage: Python; --> 
    <c:detection>[similarities and differences between Ruby and ]Python[ but I didn't find any idioms list in Ruby, so if]</c:detection> 
    <c:prefix>similarities and differences between Ruby and</c:prefix> 
    <c:exact>Python</c:exact> 
    <c:suffix>but I didn't find any idioms list in Ruby, so if</c:suffix> 
    <c:relevance>0.543</c:relevance> 
  </rdf:Description>
 
  <rdf:Description rdf:about="...">
    <!-- ProgrammingLanguage: Ruby; --> 
    <c:detection>[ list in Ruby, so if you know one or if you are a ]Ruby[ programmer, please post a]</c:detection> 
    <c:prefix>list in Ruby, so if you know one or if you are a</c:prefix> 
    <c:exact>Ruby</c:exact> 
    <c:suffix>programmer, please post a</c:suffix> 
    <c:relevance>0.386</c:relevance> 
  </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

The analyzed text is quite small but the results seems OK : 2 programming languages detected here, no animal, no gemtone...

If you like semantics or if you work on NLP projects, you should already know DBPedia. Database plus a set of tools that allow you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia. Some days ago, DBPedia 3.2 was released and now, it includes DBpedia Ontology, a manually created cross-domain ontology based on the most commonly used infoboxes within Wikipedia.

Read more on the official announcement

Note: I'm a bit late on this news, I will try to update the blog more often.