From Open Calais:

Today we released version 4.3 of the OpenCalais service, as well as key updates to both our Tagaroo plugin for WordPress and SemanticProxy, our URL submission service.

• Improved ‘Social Tags’:  We have expanded on our popular social tags categorization technique with more generalized, aggregate tags. For example, if a blogger is comparing the racing performance of sports cars like the Ferrari 308 GTB and Porsche 959, OpenCalais 4.3 will suggest auto racing and motorsport as Social Tags, in addition to the more obvious sports cars.




• News Names: We are instituting a process of name normalization that represents a first step toward our more robust vision for person disambiguation. For a partial or extended name appearing in content, OpenCalais 4.3 will suggest the most commonly used form of that same name. For example, for articles containing Barack Obama, Obama or Barack Hussein Obama, OpenCalais will suggest Barack Obama.




• New Entities, Facts and Events in English: See the new Natural and Manmade Disaster attributes, supporting data for upcoming events (Movies, Music Albums, and anticipated Medical Treatments), Political entities, facts and events, and enhanced Person Career extraction.

We listened to you and have improved Tagaroo with more user control over tagging. We have also normalized SemanticProxy processing to ensure that its results are identical with those you'd get by programmatically submitting content to OpenCalais via the API. Additionally, you can now specify a callback function when requesting results in JSON.

This release also features an updated Calais ontology in OWL, improved Simple Format and Microformat outputs, and several extraction bug fixes. See the full release notes

for more details on Release 4.3.