It looks like the predictions come true and semantic web takes off in 2008. After Google another big player (one you wouldn’t expect in the game at the first first glance), Reuters, made a nifty tool for semantic processing called Calais available.

The Calais web service automatically attaches rich semantic metadata to the content you submit - in well under a second. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais categorizes and links your document with entities (people, places, organizations, etc.), facts (person ‘x’ works for company ‘y’), and events (person ‘z’ was appointed chairman of company ‘y’ on date ‘x’). The metadata results are stored centrally and returned to you as industry-standard RDF constructs accompanied by a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID).

It seems to have quite some power under the hood.