CalaisSDFORUM / Semantic Web SIG

Sep 3, 2008

Calais?

ClearForest• Founded in 1998 by text analytics

pioneers

• A software organization that enables Intelligent Information

• Enterprise and government customers

• Led the market in the establishment of unstructured text as a key corporate asset

• Acquired by Reuters June 2007

• Offices: Boston, Israel

Today: Toolkit for Building Next Generation Solutions

Semantic Web and Advertising

Right Offer

Right Way

Right Person

Right Time

+ =

The Real World

• Most advertising driving content is text

• Most of it isn’t semantically enabled

• Most of it won’t be semantically enabled

• Why: Latency, cost and short shelf-life

Calais’ Piece of the Puzzle

• A semantic metadata

generation service that extracts

entities, facts and events from

unstructured text

• Two new capabilities: topics &

relevance

• Available for commercial or

non-commercial use up to

40,000 times per day

Calais

Named Entities

Facts Events

People,

Companies,

Geographies,

Albums,

Authors, etc.

Position,

Alliance,

Education,

Political

Affiliation, etc.

Management

Change, IPO,

Labor Action,

Sporting,

Entertainment

etc.

Unstructured Documents

(Text / HTML / XML)

<Topic>M&A</Topic>

<Acquisition offset="494" length="130">  <Company_Acquirer>Reuters</Company_Acquirer>   <Company_Acquired>ClearForest Ltd.</Company_Acquired>   <Status>Planned</Status> </Acquisition>

<Company>Reuters</Company>

<Company>ClearForest Ltd.</Company>

<Product>Text Analytic Solution </Product>

<Company>ClearForest Ltd.</Company>

<Company>Reuters</Company>

<Country>United States</Country>

<Country>Israel</Country>

<Company>Reuters</Company>

<Person>Gerry Campbell</Person>

<ManagementChange offset="2789" length="92"> <Person>Gerry Campbell</Person> <Company>Reuters</Company> <Action>Enters</Position> </ManagementChange>

Reuters Announced the Acquisition of ClearForest

New York - April 30, 2007

Reuters, the global information company, has entered into an agreement to acquire all of the outstanding shares of ClearForest Ltd., a privately held provider of Text Analytics solutions, whose tagging platform and analytical products allow clients to derive precise business information from huge amounts of textual content.

ClearForest has received sufficient shareholder approval to complete the transaction, which is expected to close in approximately 30 days, subject to customary closing conditions. The financial terms were not disclosed. Reuters plans to retain and continue to work with the existing management team and their highly skilled workforces in the US and Israel. It also plans to continue to support existing products and customers.

Reuters believes that search will be a pivotal element to the future of how financial information is sourced and consumed. As part of its drive into this space, Reuters has created a new strategic group and appointed Gerry Campbell, who will oversee the integration of ClearForest and drive this innovation.

What Calais Understands Today• Entities

– City , Company , Continent , Country , Currency , EmailAddress , EntertainmentAwardEvent , Facility , FaxNumber , Holiday , IndustryTerm , MarketIndex , MedicalCondition , Movie , MusicAlbum , MusicGroup , NaturalDisaster , NaturalFeature , Organization , Person , PhoneNumber , Product , ProvinceOrState , PublishedMedium , RadioProgram , RadioStation , Region , SportsEvent , SportsGame , Technology , TVShow , TVStation , URL

• Events & Facts– Acquisition , Alliance , AnalystEarningsEstimate , AnalystRecommendation , Bankruptcy ,

BusinessRelation , Buybacks , CompanyAffiliates , CompanyCustomer , CompanyEarningsAnnouncement , CompanyEarningsGuidance , CompanyInvestment , CompanyLegalIssues , CompanyLocation , CompanyMeeting , CompanyReorganization , CompanyTechnology , ConferenceCall , CreditRating , FamilyRelation , IPO , JointVenture , ManagementChange , Merger , PersonAttributes , PersonCommunication , PersonEducation , PersonPolitical , PersonPoliticalPast , PersonProfessional, PersonTravel , Quotation , StockSplit

• Topics– Business, technology, health, sports. etc. – Significant growth planned

• Growing– 10 – 15 new concepts are added every couple of months

Live Example

Viewer Demo

Gnosis Demo

Extending Calais’ Reach

More than just a web service – a growing collection of tools

and applications to make it valuable in the real world

Calais

BrowserExtensions

Gnosis

Content Management Tools

WordPress

Drupal

UIMA

Development Tools & Libraries

PHP

Ruby

JAVA

.NET

Applications

And more…

TopBraid

RSS Tagger

Powerhouse

LinkedFacts

Wirecatch

FeedShaver

How Calais is Being Used Today• Mail & Guardian OnlineMail & Guardian Online is using Calais to consolidate multiple

content sources into sections and provide enhanced navigation in those news sections.

How Calais is Being Used Today• GistGist Automatically aggregates multiple news sources and automatically slots them

into topic, etc.

How Calais is Being Used Today

• A few other examples

– Event based monitoring

– Investing and risk assessment

– Various topical syndication plays

– Intelligent RSS aggregators

– Automated Micro-Sites

A Question for Discussion Later..

• Where are the advertising people?

– Almost 6,000 registered users

– Dozens of deployed applications

– Close to 1,000,000 uses per day

Making it Applicable to Advertising

• Disclaimer….

• What do we need for effective advertising?

• Four key components– Something to sell

– Contextual Framework (keywords…?)

– Knowledge about the potential buyer &

– Knowledge of the buyers behavior

Context

• Calais can provide context – not just keywords

• Event & relationship detection is your friend

• Examples– Sporting Event (& team)

– Album Release (& artist)

– Management Change (& person, company, position)

– Family Relation

– Person Political

– Quotes

Knowing the Buyer & Behavior

• We have two fundamental tools

– Profiles & other volunteered information

– Behavioral breadcrumbs

– Calais allows you to create a much richer behavioral profile of the consumer – a contextual profile

– Example: What kinds of content do they consume?• Sports, business, technology, health, lifestyle

• What people do they read about, what companies?

Five Ideas

• Again…

– I am not an advertising guy

– Let’s get the discussion started

Context-Driven Ad Placement

• Moving beyond keywords

– Can we use the semantic metadata generated by Calais to create richer context for placing an correctly?

– For example – sporting events, album releases

Topic Hubs & Microsites

“Aboutness” and Relevancy

When a computer glitch at a Federal Aviation Administration centre caused widespread airline delays this week, it served as a reminder that the US flight system is waiting for a modernising overhaul. But it also appears the FAA's management of its existing technologies falls short of standards in other vital sectors. By using computing practises that would be considered poor in credit card networks or power plant operators, for example, the FAA was vulnerable to a problem caused when new software was loaded at the Atlanta centre that distributes flight plans. Because the FAA relies on just two computing systems, one in Atlanta and one in Salt Lake City, to handle that chore for the entire nation, the software glitch all but sank the system on Tuesday. The Salt Lake centre remained up and served as a backup, but it became overloaded by information coming from airlines. More than 600 flights were delayed from Atlanta all the way to Boston and Chicago. A failure at the same Atlanta centre caused major delays across the East Coast in June 2007. Such breakdowns often can be prevented with sufficient redundancy, or enough different computers and communication channels to handle the same workload in an emergency. Redundancy is so critical for power and water utilities that they can be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars a day if they're found insufficiently prepared - and $1-million (about R8-million) per day if they're found to be wilfully negligent. 'In the industries I work in, if you have something that critical, you generally build more redundancy,' said Jason Larsen, a security researcher with consultancy IOActive who previously spent five years at Idaho National Laboratory examining electrical plants' control systems. 'If this (FAA outage) happened at a power plant, I'd be telling them to open up their checkbook and expect to be fined.' FAA spokesperson Tammy Jones stressed that these types of problems 'don't happen on a mass scale or a regular basis,' and noted that the FAA handles 50 000 to 60 000 fights a day. And flying on US airlines has never been safer. 'The system is working,' she said. 'We are making sure people are getting from one place to another.' Basil Barimo, vice president of operations and safety for the Air Transport Association of America, a trade association that represents the nation's largest carriers, says the fundamental problem is that the FAA still relies on outdated technology, including a radar-based control system designed in the 1940s and '50s. Barimo is optimistic that the FAA's NextGen modernisation program - a $15-billion-plus upgrade to satellite-based technology that will take nearly 20 years to complete - will help make more efficient use of the nation's airspace and safely allow more planes in the sky. At the Atlanta centre that saw this week's failure, the National Airspace Data Interchange Network computer has been owned and operated by the FAA since the 1980s, after the Dutch company that developed it went out of business. The network is being upgraded, and will have much more memory, process data much more quickly and be more robust and 'fault-tolerant.' 'We should see significant improvements by the end of September ... which should prevent the type of problem we had on Tuesday,' said FAA spokesperson Laura Brown. The agency also is considering adding a third backup site for that and other systems at a technology centre in New Jersey, but no final decisions have been made, she added. However, Doug Church, a spokesperson for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association - a union that has been locked in a contract dispute with the FAA since 2006 - argues that the agency has tried to focus on future technology to deflect its lack of diligence in maintaining its current systems. Not only did Church cite the agency's lack of a 'safety net of redundancy,' but he also pointed to its 'fix-on-fail' policy of waiting for something to break before addressing a problem. Indeed, in December, the agency exempted its computer maintenance personnel from having to perform some periodic certification checks as required by government handbooks for technical equipment. The FAA said that would eliminate unnecessary certifications that historically had little or no effect on total system performance and safety. And a 2006 report from the Government Accountability Office had found support for the idea in some instances. But computing experts say they often advise private companies to reject that approach. 'It's common, you see it in retail too - it's the whole 'don't fix it if it ain't broke' thing,' said Branden Williams, director of a unit of VeriSign that assesses the security of retailers' payment systems. 'It's unfortunate because it's very reactive, and it typically winds up costing you more. If you do fix-on-fail, it usually costs you more.' Of course, there's a difference between a private company's outage that delays your DVD order, and one at the agency administering airline traffic. And such events have happened to the FAA multiple times. Communications between an air traffic control centre in Memphis, which directs planes passing through a 250-mile radius from the city, and an unknown number of airplanes were disrupted this month when a car struck a utility pole, severing a fibre-optic cable. Last September, the same centre lost all its communications and some air traffic controllers had to use their personal cell phones to route planes out of the seven-state area. The FAA blamed that outage on the failure of a major AT&T phone line. In May, the FAA system that issues preflight notices to pilots about runway, equipment and security issues went down for about a day when a server crashed and the backup operated too slowly to be effective. The database was not able to issue updates or new notices, but pilots continued to receive relevant information from local air traffic controllers and through alternate systems. After this week's outage, Paul Proctor, a Gartner analyst focused on security and regulatory compliance for large corporations, said it appeared that the FAA didn't deploy the flight-plan computers with nearly as much redundancy as big companies generally have in systems critical to their operations. 'You need to do a good analysis about whether this is acceptable risk,' Proctor said. 'One of the things the government is betting on is the fact that if there's ... a failure, it's not a safety issue.' Sid McGuirk, associate professor and coordinator of the air traffic management program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., believes that given the budget realities facing the FAA, the agency has maintained a good balance. It keeps the system running efficiently without compromising safety, said McGuirk, a former air traffic controller and FAA manager for 35 years. 'From time to time, we are going to have a glitch, but it's a tradeoff,' he said. 'Would I like to see more modern equipment in the system? Sure. But most folks would not want to see their taxes tripled to pay for new technology every two years.'

FAA outage reveals odd practises<

“Aboutness” and Relevancy

• What’s in that?– Dozens of people, places, things

– Dozens of quotes

– Hundreds? of keywords

• What’s Important?– Federal Aviation Administration – 0.781

– Atlanta – 0.773

– United States – 0.443

– Boston – 0.401

FAA outage reveals odd practises<

Mashup Ads

• Context-enhanced ads

– Can we use metadata generated by Calais (places, events, etc) to create customized ads?

– Mashupads from Dapper are a start – but they rely on structure.

Contextual Profiling

• Can we create much richer customer profiles based on behavior?

– What people do I read about?

– What geographies do I read about?

– How much time do I spend reading business news vs. lifestyle news?

• www.opencalais.com

– Gallery – code and applications examples

– Forums

– Documentation