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Sunday, November 16, 2008

ClearForest SWS

ClearForest SWS

A brief note to introduce the beta of ClearForest Semantic Web Services (SWS-1).

The first question on everyone’s mind should be - “what the heck is a semantic web service?”. In this post we’ll try to at least start the discussion on what we mean by SWS.

The semantic web is an admirable goal. When it becomes real the web will be transformed from a mass of unstructured stuff into an amazing knowledge repository. Moving far beyond the hypertext library that is the current web - we will have programmatic access to a repository of information that dwarfs anything we can imagine today. But, there’s one catch: it’s not here yet and won’t be for a long long time.

We hate waiting. We know that there is an amazing amount of information out there that is begging to be retrieved, combined, enhanced and generally made use of. The problem is that the vast majority of that information is trapped inside text. Not structured text. Not clean text. Not standardized text. Not gramatically proper text. Just your normal messy everyday text. It’s trapped - and we aim to free it.

Over the last decade ClearForest has developed an amazing suite of natural language processing tools. Big organizations like financial publishers, banks and manufacturers use that technology to extract meaning from text. It works and it works well - but we want to see what can happen when those capabilities are translated to the web world.

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