ReadWriteWeb's Alex Iskold blogged last week about how Reuters is trying to help organize all on the Internet — including its own content — by launching its API — Open Calais.

As complex as programming and APIs can get, the idea behind Open Calais is rather simple.  Reuters simply wants to find a better way to easily identify important bits of information in an article or on a web page.  For instance, a news article has the who, where, when, where, why, and how in it; thus, finding a way to pull out the people, organizations, location, etc. in an article would help file the article in vast sea of information.

Hopefully, this will make it a lot easier for people to find articles about events that occurred at a specific time, involved an individual or organization, took place in a certain city, was caused by a specific issue, etc.  Needless to say, anyone who deals with information — which should include virtually all of us — will benefit from more enhanced technology to sort through the large amounts of information that we literally have at our finger tips through the Internet.

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