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forgot to say, you can get a pre-setup version of drupal to do some of this too : http://openpublishapp.com/ - at the time this was already setup to work with opencalais - ( http://www.opencalais.com/cala... )

There's really two different capabilities being discussed here. One (the Northwestern example) is the actual generation of prose from an underlying data asset. There are certain well structured domains of information (baseball games, earnings announcements, etc) where this will most likely work quite well. The second capability is automating the analysis of new content. NewsScope falls into that category. It takes raw news (written by humans) and extracts key terms, entities and events to make that content more easily consumable by machines. If you're interested you can use the same Thomson Reuters tools that are under NewsScope on your own content. My site uses them to analyze news from feeds, throw most of it away and put the rest in the right places. Thomson makes this capability available to anybody for free at a project called OpenCalais (see http://viewer.opencalais.com/ to play with it). Another group has built it into a complete publishing platform called OpenPublish.

...Sphinx for lightning-fast searches (and stemming, and relevancy, and much more) and Open Calais for text analysis. Combine this data set with those two tools and you could have a pretty nifty site.

I disagree. First of all, the semantic web is just about allowing content creators to associate context with their content to facilitate a context sensitive search. The semantic web has lackluster adoption because google does a great job at context sensitive search without the context providing meta-data markup.

A more limited version of semantic web has achieved some notable traction. Microformats are another way of associating context with content that is more agreeable with content providers.

A more compelling technology offering than Nepomuk for advancing semantic web would be Reuters' OpenCalais project. That's the one you should be watching. Another interesting trend to watch is how semantic web is affecting the more popular collective intelligence movement.

http://developer.opencalais.com/forum/read/14617

Reuters just opened access to their corporate semantic technology crown jewels. For free. For anyone. Their Calais API lets you turn unstructured text into a formal RDF graph in about one second. ...

You understand that Reuters will retain a copy of the metadata submitted by you or that generated by the Calais service. By submitting or generating metadata through the Calais service, you grant Reuters a non-exclusive perpetual, sublicensable, royalty-free license to that metadata. From a privacy standpoint, Reuters use of this metadata is governed by the terms of the Reuters and Calais Privacy Statements.

Reuters just opened access to their corporate semantic technology crown jewels. For free. For anyone. Their Calais API lets you turn unstructured text into a formal RDF graph in about one second. ...

You understand that Reuters will retain a copy of the metadata submitted by you or that generated by the Calais service. By submitting or generating metadata through the Calais service, you grant Reuters a non-exclusive perpetual, sublicensable, royalty-free license to that metadata. From a privacy standpoint, Reuters use of this metadata is governed by the terms of the Reuters and Calais Privacy Statements.