The quick background. Drupal is a hot Open Source content management and web . . . → Read More: OpenPublish; Deploy a high performance (semantic) web site in hours – not months.]]> A week ago or so our partner – Phase2Technology – announced the release of OpenPublish. The dust has settled from DrupalCon a bit and I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about what OpenPublish is and why it is very very important.

The quick background. Drupal is a hot Open Source content management and web site deployment platform. It has probably tens of thousands of users and thousands of internal and external deployments. Suffice it to say it’s the hot thing in Open Source CMS platforms right now.

Drupal let’s you build a site fairly quickly. It won’t be pretty and it won’t have much functionality – but it can be up and running in a matter of minutes.  Then you can spend the next few days, weeks or months giving it a nice look and feel, finding the extensions for the functionality you need and perhaps building some glue to hook it all together. Weeks or months later you’ll have the basics in place and can start to think about the advanced features you’d like to implement – in the next few weeks or months.

(Elapsed time – maybe 1-3 months)

Or, we can do it the OpenPublish way. Download the installation setup (from here), run the setup, Get a key from Open Calais (here), enter it into OpenPublish.

Done. Start writing or grabbing feeds. You’re finished.

(Elapsed time – maybe 1 hour)

But – here’s where things start to get very interesting. OpenPublish isn’t just a quick way to install Drupal. OpenPublish uses Calais semantic technology (look at that – seven paragraphs in and the first time we’ve used the word semantic) to provide features even the big guys don’t have. Here are a few examples:

• Articles are automatically tagged with the people, places, companies, geographies and other elements inside them. You can do this automatically by setting relevance thresholds or do it interactively where Calais suggests and you approve.

• You can automatically tag your archives. Thousand of articles – no problem. Millions – give us a call and we’ll work something out to get it done in a day or two.

• You can automatically create topic hubs on any tag (e.g. Drupal vocabulary), set of tags, logical arguments about tags. Want a topic hub on “Natural Disasters” in California? About five clicks and it’s done – and it will maintain itself forever.

• “More like this” functionality is built right in. Your readers can see other related content on your site or – at your option – on other blogs or mainline news sources.

• Map integration, RDF generation and exposure, lots of other cool stuff.

What we like is that the semantics aren’t the goal here – they’re simply the enabler for a high performance publishing platform.

If you’re a publisher and you want help customizing the installation you should contact our friends at Phase2 and they’d be happy to help. If you’re a smaller non-profit, an advocacy organization or generally someone who doesn’t have a lot of money or time – OpenPublish can literally get you up and running in hours.

The Calais Initiative is proud to sponsor the development of the Drupal modules underlying OpenPublish and proud to work with the Phase2 team – they’re a great group of people.

P.S. It’s all free.

P.P.S Nancy Kho wrote a great overview here.

Calais is an initiative by Thomson Reuters to provide one of the core building blogs of the Semantic Web: semantic metadata generation. At the core of Calais is a web service that ingests text content, analyzes using natural language processing, machine learning, . . . → Read More: Calais Ecosystem: Calais for Drupal]]> Time to start talking about great tools that have been built on top of Calais.

Calais is an initiative by Thomson Reuters to provide one of the core building blogs of the Semantic Web: semantic metadata generation. At the core of Calais is a web service that ingests text content, analyzes using natural language processing, machine learning, lexicons and statistical analysis to extract semantic data from the text and return it as structured information – primarily as RDF. Enough about Calais – I’ll write a big long post about it in the near future.

One of our biggest goals with Calais is to develop – or help others develop – tools that translate this from geekdom to real world usability. One of the areas of focus for that is to integrate Calais within a variety of content presentation and management platforms. There’s a wide range of those platforms – but Drupal stands out as being one of the fastest growing ones in the mid-tier publishing space.

Shortly after Calais was released two members of the Phase2Technology team – Frank Febbraro and Irakli Nadareishvili just stepped up and made it happen by building the Calais Modules for Drupal.

These modules provide a strong building block for construction semantically-enabled Calais applications. The modules provide seamless integration between a range of Drupal node types and the Calais service.

From their description…

The Calais module lets you configure which Content Types you want to request Calais metadata on update. The entities returned can then be automatically assigned to vocabularies related to the Content Types, or it can only suggest terms based on the Calais metadata and allow the user to select the terms you want to associate (think of del.icio.us recommending tags). A flexible set of hooks allows 3rd party modules to make modifications before or after Calais terms have been applied. There are many level of configuration and integration and this is just the beginning.

The Calais Tag Modifier module allows for basic blacklisting of tags, so that you never get terms suggested that you don’t care about. The term substitution mechanism also allows you to modify returned metadata before it gets assigned or suggested.

Beyond what Phase2 has developed to date, the Calais Initiative and Phase2 have agreed to work together over the coming six months to release a series of significant enhancements built on the Calais modules. These enhancements will be oriented toward even tighter integration of Calais with Drupal and providing a comprehensive Calais-powered set of capabilities such as topic hubs and other publisher-oriented features.

So – that’s the description: here’s what’s cool. One of the hottest publishing platforms in the world is integrated with Calais. Users can get access to Calais’ capabilities with essentially zero effort. And – all of this was built buy two highly motivated guys that saw a need and just moved in and got it done.