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Thomson Reuters partners KNC winner DocumentCloud

Posted: 24/09/09 By: Judith Townend

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Knight News Challenge 2009 winner DocumentCloud today announced a new partnership with Thomson Reuters.

DocumentCloud, an open-source platform to make data more easily accessible, will use Thomson Reuters' OpenCalais service to extract information from documents.

"This will make it easy for readers and journalists to explore connections between documents and across the full collection of source materials," explained one of DocumentCloud's founders, Scott Klein, in a post announcing the new partnership.

Last week the project, which is supported by ProPublica and the New York Times,released its first open-source code since launch, CloudCrowd.

DocumentCloud today also announced the names of 21 additional partners, who will work as 'beta-testers'.

"They'll be contributing documents and giving us feedback as we work out the kinks," said Klein, editor of online development at ProPublica.

These include: the Center for Democracy and Technology/OpenCRS, The Atlantic, the Centre for Investigative Journalism, City University London, the Center for Investigative Reporting/California Watch, the Center for Public Integrity, the Chicago Tribune, The New Yorker, MinnPost, MSNBC, the Sunlight Foundation and the Washington Post.

The goal of DocumentCloud is to 'super-charge' investigations by making documents and their contents easier to find and share, explained Klein.

"Readers will be able to search documents on DocumentCloud and then will be pointed to the documents themselves on contributing organisations' websites," he said.

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