It’s been a little over 90 days since we went live with Calais. Thanks to folks like you, we have more than 3,000 registered developers, a rapidly growing collection of third-party tools and applications and a really gratifying level of interest. And – we continue to learn what’s important to our users, what we’re doing well and where we need to improve.

As you may remember, we promised some significant new functionality for Release 2: here it is.

What we’ve delivered in R2 closely aligns to what users have asked us for. That doesn’t mean we’ve been able to deliver everything people requested - but we’ve merged the highest-volume requests with our basic roadmap and come up with a great combination.

We’re in the process of updating our roadmap to reflect what we’ve learned and to add some new components that we think are extremely important. No details right now, but we think you’ll agree… it’s time to start integrating the world of linked data with the world of Calais.

So here is a list of new tools and functionality. Details on these items can be found in the Gallery or Documentation sections of the web site.

New and improved Entities, including (a first attempt at) pop culture: In R2 we’ve taken our first big step in using open data resources to broaden the range of entities we extract. In this first step we’ve deployed a dozen new entity types that Calais can recognize across a range of topics. Examples of new entity types in this release are: Movie, TV Show, Musical Album, Musical Group, Entertainment Award, Sporting Event, Drug Products, Medical Condition, and Publisher.

Now that we’ve proven to ourselves that this can be done and delivers high-quality results, the rate at which we will roll these out will accelerate dramatically.

We’ve also made significant enhancements to a number of existing entity types. For example, besides improving our Person recognition capabilities, we now attempt to attribute Person with types such as Sports, Entertainment, Political, etc.

New, Easy-to-Use Output Types: Our formal RDF output is the correct solution, but it’s not always the easiest to use. We’ve implemented two new output formats to make it easier to incorporate Calais functionality into your application.

• First, the Simple Tags Format dispenses with everything but the core entity and event metadata generated by Calais. This format can be readily leveraged for simple tagging applications without the overhead of RDF parsing. 

• Second: Microformats! Calais can now deliver your results to you as microformat-formatted metadata. While the microformat structure isn’t rich enough to contain everything Calais generates, we’ve done our best to create a reasonable translation.

Support for Metadata Crawlers, including Yahoo!: We know you have been following Yahoo’s announcement that they’ll be harvesting and making searchable the metadata embedded in web sites. But - we also know that for the most part there isn’t much metadata embedded in most sites.

We fixed that with Calais QuickMeta™: a simple PHP-based plugin that any site owner can embed in their page. When that page is crawled by Yahoo, Calais will automatically process the contents of the page, generate microformat metadata and return the page and embedded metadata to the crawler. We’re going to borrow a term from an unnamed large search engine and call this a product of “Calais Labs”. While we’re in our shakedown cruise we’d recommend that only advanced users work with it.

Support for WordPress, Including Tags and Images: Today we’re releasing Calais Tagaroo™ - a WordPress plug-in that makes life simpler for WordPress bloggers. Calais Tagaroo works in the background while you’re writing your blog entry. It automatically generates suggested tags and provides you with a professional graphical interface for selecting those tags you want to incorporate in your post.

Want to create visually compelling blog entries with great images? Tired of searching, checking copyrights, resizing and inserting them? Tagaroo does it for you. As you type, Tagaroo searches Flickr for images that match Tagaroo’s tags or those you’ve entered yourself. Click on a suggested image, choose how you want it formatted, click to insert - and you’re done. Learn more about Tagaroo at tagaroo.opencalais.com.

Support for Drupal: Drupal is clearly emerging as one of the most powerful and popular content management systems in the world. It needed to be integrated with Calais - and the team at Phase2Technology has done just that. Phase2’s module, located here, is able to apply Calais’s automated semantic metadata generation capabilities throughout Drupal.

With rich configuration options, the module can automatically process incoming RSS feeds, news stories, blog entries - or any other Drupal content type. We’re pretty excited about how publishers using Drupal can take advantage of this.

Code Samples, including PHP and JSON:  We’ve added great, well-documented code samples for accessing Calais in PHP, and a JSON output representation of the Calais metadata.  In combination with some of the great tools and libraries built by Calais community members, these can jump-start your development and integration efforts.

New Community and OpenCalais Web Site: We have launched our new and vastly improved Web site and online community here at OpenCalais.com. The new site supports great interactive forum and community features, vastly improved search and navigation and a host of other cosmetic and functional improvements. The site is based on Drupal – which we’re just learning. We expect there will be some bugs and a brief period where things are a bit rocky – but we’ll fix anything you tell us about as soon as possible.

We’ll be migrating all of our registered users to the new site automatically so no need to re-register.

Got feedback?  Let us know what you think, and add a post below.