Tom Tague from OpenCalais here.

First – thanks for both the experiment and publishing what worked and didn’t work well for you. We really appreciate this kind of feedback.

You’ve pointed out a few areas where we can improve – and I agree with all of them. But – I do want to make one clarification.

OpenCalais isn’t a general purpose “tagger” – so things like wedding or marriage which are not entities, facts or events that Calais understands won’t get tagged. We do have an alternative mechanism called SocialTags (it’s a parameter to the API call) that I’d encourage you to explore. I ran the content of your article on marriages through our demo tool at http://viewer.opencalais.com and got a SocialTags response that looked like this: https://www.sugarsync.com/pf/D33161_000615_7549367

As you can see this does expose concepts such as marriage, civil marriage and wedding – as well as a few others that are less useful.

Thanks again for sharing!

Regards,