Stefan Magdalinski has posted details about his BBC News Wikiproxy. His goal is to integrate the Beeb with the greater web, and wikiproxied stories include Wikipedia links for capitalzed nouns. Technorati references relating to the story are also incorporated.

I am very jazzed about this because I am nearly done with a long SEC company and officer extraction run. A test appplication I built uses this data to identify names in Yahoo! / Reuters stories, and the BBC was next in line.

Stefan's wikiproxy should help me get started on connecting my company names and people to Wikipedia URIs, along the lines of James Tauber's interesting suggestion. I plan to use Wikipedia references in human-readable interfaces, along with equally-useful SEC Edgar and Yahoo! Finance representations of companies.

The PHP source code uses regexes in the identification of names; my bot will probably be doing some additional work with respect to the story context to ensure good matches.

By way of Cory Doctorow.