Member Avatar for MktgRob

While at InternetWeekNY I heard some people reference something called OpenCalais. It is a service that works with the content you put up (Blog, CMS, website, etc) and creates metadata based on the content. I have been checking out the website for it and I am still not getting the gist of it. Has anyone else seen it or possible even used it and could provide and explanation and/or review of the product/service. The one thing I have picked up on is that the service part of it is free for anyone to use and it has been built to handle a lot of traffic. The big word involved in this seems to be 'semantic'.

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and raised the right points — OpenCalais is essentially an automated NLP/entity-extraction API that pulls out people, places, organizations, topics, events and relations from text and returns machine-readable metadata (RDF/JSON). That output is most useful when it feeds internal systems (search, faceted navigation, recommendations) or is mapped to a structured-data vocabulary and published on the page so other services can consume it. is an example of that extractor approach.

Practically, the industry moved toward a common publishing pattern: map extracted entities to the schema.org vocabulary and emit structured data using JSON-LD. Schema.org provides the types and properties (Article, LocalBusiness, Person, etc.) and Google documents that structured data can enable rich results but does not guarantee higher rankings (Schema.org and Google Structured Data overview). A minimal JSON-LD example for an article:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "Article title",
  "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Author Name" },
  "datePublished": "2025-01-01"
}
</script>

A practical workflow: 1) run content through an extractor, 2) map entities to schema.org types, 3) generate JSON-LD and inject it into page templates, and 4) store extracted metadata in the CMS for search and navigation. Always validate markup with tools like Google Rich Results Test (rich-results test) or the Schema Markup Validator (validator.schema.org). Caveats: automated tags can be noisy — apply confidence thresholds and editorial review. Structured data supports discoverability and better snippets (and, as suggested, can help local features when using LocalBusiness/Geo types) but it complements — not replaces — solid content, links, and consistent local listings (NAP/Google Business Profile).

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Member Avatar for MktgRob

Something else I just read about the concept of the 'Semantic Web'. Yahoo just announced the part the played in creating and supporting the new 'common tag'. They claimed that this new tag makes content more discoverable on the web and helps communities create more useful apps for aggregating, searching and browsing the web. Has anyone heard about this and/or has anyone started using this new tag in their SEO efforts?

Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

Hi
I definitely heard of Calais at Semantic meetups. I saw a presentation of it and was very impressed. I read an article that said that major search engines will release a semantic component to their search engines in the near future. The question is, "When is the near future?"

Member Avatar for MktgRob

Hi
I definitely heard of Calais at Semantic meetups. I saw a presentation of it and was very impressed. I read an article that said that major search engines will release a semantic component to their search engines in the near future. The question is, "When is the near future?"

With Yahoo talking up this new tag, it looks like the future is sooner than we think. Everything I read about this talks about makes me think that these semantic tags are going to be more helpful with local searches as the goal seems to be more searching more on regular phrases rather than optimized search terms geared toward high page rank but that is just my humble opinion.

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