ClearForest
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software, Text analytics, Text mining |
| Founded | 1998 |
| Fate | Acquired by Reuters in April 2007 |
| Headquarters | Near Boston , United States |
Area served | Global |
| Products | OpenCalais, Semantic Web Services (SWS), Gnosis, Harvest |
| Parent | Reuters (from 2007) |
ClearForest was a software firm from Israel that specialized in solutions for text analytics and text mining.
History
Established in 1998, ClearForest maintained its headquarters near Boston and operated a development facility in Or Yehuda. Reuters acquired the company in April 2007, subsequently offering its technologies under the names Calais, OpenCalais, and OneCalais.
The company received venture capital backing, with its final investment round led by Greylock Ventures in 2005. Additional financiers included DB Capital Partners, Pitango, Walden Israel, Booz Allen, JP Morgan Partners, and HarbourVest Partners.
On February 7, 2008, Reuters introduced Open Calais, a semantic analysis and named-entity recognition platform built upon ClearForest’s technology.
The purchase price for ClearForest by Reuters was approximately $25 million.
Solutions and Products
ClearForest provided multiple hosted offerings:
- OpenCalais: a complimentary web-based service and open API that performs named-entity recognition and automatic metadata creation utilizing ClearForest’s financial module.
- Semantic Web Services (SWS): an on-demand platform delivering ClearForest’s natural language processing capabilities through standard web services; a portion of this service is available at no cost.
- Gnosis: a free extension for Firefox that uses SWS to analyze webpage content by detecting entities such as individuals, corporations, organizations, locations, and products; it also enriches Wikipedia articles with additional entity hyperlinks.
- Harvest: a real-time news feed designed for machine consumption that processes corporate news and document streams to extract details about people, companies, places, and more than 200 other entity categories.
ClearForest’s Text Analytics offerings addressed particular business challenges including:
- Equity assessment for hedge funds and alternative investment entities
- Metadata generation and database development for publishers and information distributors
- Customer sentiment analysis for market research and survey organizations
- Early warning quality systems for manufacturers of vehicles, capital equipment, and durable goods