Oracle and Thomson Reuters announced that the new Oracle Database 11g Release 2, Semantic Technologies will officially support the OpenCalais service (a semantic metadata extraction service). The integration enables Oracle users to directly tap the power of OpenCalais to incorporate "rich" semantic metadata into their production workflow environments.
Semantic metadata generated by OpenCalais (a natural language processing (NLP) technology) can now be loaded, indexed and queried natively within Oracle Database. This enables application developers to extracting the 'who, what, when, where and how' from text and break content down into its most basic elements to improve search and navigation, and make integration and interoperability of content possible across diverse platforms.
"Connecting the OpenCalais service -- which has helped popularize semantic technologies in the developer community -- with Oracle Database is a compelling value proposition for our customers," said Xavier Lopez, Director, Spatial & Semantic Technologies, Oracle Server Technologies. "This interoperability lets users quickly process documents in different formats such as Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF to extract semantic metadata that can be used for more semantically complete searches in Oracle Database 11g."
If you're asking yourself what in the world this possible has to do with you, consider this. You, just like Oracle, can leverage this semantic metadata extraction service if you're running WordPress (Tagaroo) or Drupal, and even "ride the semantic wave" with Yahoo using Calais QuickMeta.
