Mashup Camp's over. We've packed our tents, tidied up the campsite, and are moving on.

The Calais team certainly had a good experience this week at Mashup Camp in Mountain View. We congratulate all the winners and contributors whose creativity and energy in developing applications drove the camp's success.

If you attended the camp, we'd love to hear about your experience - what worked, what didn't. If you'd never attended mashup camp before, how did it meet your expectations? If you're an old pro, how did it differ from previous camps?

We're headed home from three exciting and exhausting days at Mashup Camp in Mountain View, CA, and all we can say is thank you!

Thanks to the many developers who worked with Calais to create fantastic mashups and brought their creativity, innovation and dedication to the 24-to-48 hour challenge.

And the winners are...

Life in the Linked Data Cloud: Calais Release 4

The Gist: Release 4 of Calais will be a big deal. In that release we’ll go beyond the ability to extract semantic data from your content. We will link that extracted semantic data to datasets from dozens of other information sources, from Wikipedia to Freebase to the CIA World Fact Book. In short – instead of being limited to the contents of the document you’re processing, you’ll be able to develop solutions that leverage a large and rapidly growing information asset: the Linked Data Cloud.

The goal of this post is just to give our community a heads-up to start thinking and planning.

Introducing the Calais Mashup Contest @ Mashup Camp

Please join us for Mashup Camp to compete in our first Calais Mashup Contest at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, Nov. 17-19, 2008.

Three Ways to Win

We are offering a 4TB Drobo as top prize for Calais mashups in three categories:

Calais Community:

A quick note to let you know that the Calais Release 3.1 technology preview moves to Calais production this Monday 11/3. If you haven't had a chance to test with 3.1 - this is the time to do it.

Details on the 3.1 release are located here. 

Well, it’s been over two weeks since we released something cool (www.semanticproxy.com) – time to get cracking on some new stuff.

We’ve placed Release 3.1 of Calais into technology preview status. Just as a reminder, technology preview is a separate instance of Calais that allows developers to evaluate new features and test their software prior to our moving the release to production. You can access the Preview by simply pointing your tool to http://beta.opencalais.com rather than http://api.opencalais.com. Just like Calais, the preview version requires that you have a developer API key – your existing key will work just fine.

We released Calais a little less than nine months ago. It’s been a fascinating process and an edifying period.

On the one hand we’ve seen a level of interest and adoption well beyond anything we’d anticipated: 6,000 registered developers. Well over 1,000,000 transactions per day. Dozens of creative and inspirational applications. It’s been great.

Here is a quick update on Calais developer events as well as new discounts on conferences where the Calais team will be presenting in the weeks ahead.  We hope to see you there, so let us know if you can make it! 

We hope to meet as many members of the OpenCalais community as possible.  Toward that end, here is a list of the September events where we are presenting and/or holding workshops. 

We would love to see you there, so let us know if you can make it!