The coolest thing at the 109^th International American Toy Fair in New York City this week might have been the Lazer Tag Blaster or the World of Warcraft version of Monopoly. Or, for semantic tech aficionados, it would have been Uma’s semantic Skin multitouch display installation. Even the Power Rangers were getting into it (see photo).

Here is the marriage of semantic technology with interactive signage and multi-touch displays, RFID technology, Intel’s Audience Impression Metrics suite, and social media integration. It is, as Christian Doegl, founder and CEO of uma, an example “where semantics gets tangible.”  And touchable by everyone.

For the Toy Fair, Uma got access to the exhibitor database, itself complete with structured metadata such as company name, location on the floor, and Twitter handle. “From this we can build up a semantic database connecting all different databases to the system,” says Doegl.

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Users of Prestashop, the popular open source e-commerce package that powers over 100,ooo shops, now have easy access to semantic markup through the release of a free extension module from Makolab S.A. The extension adds markup from the GoodRelations vocabulary using RDFa syntax to the product item page templates. Read more

 

More vendors are making waves among the ranks of those that figure semantic technology has a role to play in the travel sector, from helping hospitality providers assess the quality of user experiences to serving as a B2B backbone for companies that want to help users book travel plans, whether they’re aiming to spend Thanksgiving with the family in Nebraska or Christmas shopping in Paris, and more.

* At the PhoCusWrite 2011 Travel Innovation Summit last week, ReviewPro won the QuickMobile Award for Travel Innovation: Emerging Category.

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Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer at BestBuy, has moved the proverbial ball forward yet again by creating an implementation of the schema.org vocabulary in BestBuy’s Black Friday web pages.

First, a bit of history…

Myers began incorporating structured data into BestBuy web pages in 2009. Starting initially with basic store information (hours of operation, location, contact information), Myers soon expanded the project to include product pages, music data, and the 600,000+ item product catalog. This work quickly became a widely cited use-case for semantic markup. In particular, it brought a lot of attention to the RDFa syntax and the GoodRelations vocabulary. The effort resulted in improved page rankings, richer display of BestBuy search listings in browsers, and — after putting user-friendly tools in the hands of store managers —  enabled Myers to tackle the retail problem of Open Box returns.

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Last month, we reported on the new RDFa 1.1 Lite proposal by Ben Adida. In our recent podcast on Schema.org with guest Ramanathan V. Guha, we touched on the topic of RDFa Lite as well.

Today, schema.org spokesperson Dan Brickley posted that “we’re pleased to give advance notice of a new way of adopting schema.org’s structured data vocabulary. W3C’s RDF Web Applications group are right now putting the finishing touches to the latest version of the RDFa standard. This work opens up new possibilities also for developers who intend to work with schema.org data using RDF-based tools and Linked Data, and defines a simplified publisher-friendly ‘Lite’ view of RDFa.”

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Antidot, which makes the semantically-powered Information Factory and Antidot Finder Suite software, this month released its db2triples as open source component software, available here, which implements the W3C RDB2RDF Working Group’s proposed R2RML language and Direct Mapping, covered here.

Antidot, in fact, shared with the W3C its experience leveraging Direct Mapping and R2RML to, in just half a day, fetch information from hundreds of tables in a client’s Magento ecommerce database to transform it to a graph model. That’s normally a complex task, says Antidot founder and CEO Fabrice Lacroix, which would involve data transformation and database content indexing of an unknown database model. “No one [here at Antidot] knows the complex, dynamic data model from Magento, and it’s very difficult to reverse-engineer these sort of models,” he says.

“So with Direct Mapping and R2RML it is very easy to go directly from the database to the graph you need…and then extract just the business objects we need. We did it in just half a day. Imagine that. For such complex stuff that’s a very short timeframe.” Lacroix says that the company thought it only fair, after that success, to send something back to the community.

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Manu Sporny, Founder/CEO of Digital Bazaar, Inc., sat down with SemanticWeb.com to discuss Payswarm, a new standard that he is working on through a W3C Community Group. This article is Part 1 of 2.

SemanticWeb.com: What is PaySwarm?
Manu Sporny: It is a universal payment standard designed specifically for the Web. Think “an open source PayPal on steroids” – an open, patent and royalty free specification for Web Payments. The goal of PaySwarm is to make crowd-funding, world-changing ideas, buying and selling online as easy as sending an e-mail or an instant message. We want payment to be baked into the core of the Web so that exciting new companies can be launched on top of this truly open payment platform.

We want to enable anybody in the world to launch a PayPal, KickStarter, or Kiva. Think of what the Web did for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo. We think PaySwarm can do that for the next generation of start-ups that want to transform the way we reward each other on the Web. Improving the way we organize financial resources to enhance our personal lives and pursue endeavors that improve upon the human condition is at the core of what we’re doing.
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A recent interview takes a look at what Facebook’s recent platform changes mean for businesses. It begins, “Recently at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, the company introduced a series of action verbs into its social platform. ‘Read,’ ‘Watch,’ and ‘Listen,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained, were added to help build a ‘language for how people connect.’ The one missing word, of course, was ‘Buy.’ That’s really why Facebook and its army of content partners from news, publishing, music, and film and TV are rushing to set up shop on the famous platform with 750 million users.” Read more

MaterialSource, an online platform focused on the sustainable materials lifecycle, will relaunch with a semantic web focus by year’s end. In development by ontoforce, the revamped site will initially cater to users in its native Belgium, but it expects to expand to include an international audience.

The goal, says ontoforce co-founder and CEO Hans Constandt, who also is MaterialSource’s co-founder and CIO, is to “apply the whole philosophy of the semantic web to doing the work of connecting small providers” in the space. It wants to lower thresholds for these purveyors of products and materials for sustainable construction to get their data to their markets in an efficient and integrated way. His partners include ontoforce co-founder and COO Stephane Roelandt and co-founder and sales/marketing head Tom Vankemmel, as well as key developer Jaroslav Martasek.

“We’re putting semantic metadata around information from those providers’ materials,” says Constandt.

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A new article discusses how semantic technologies can and are changing the face of the online travel industry. The article states, “Shopping the experience means using customer benefits, words, and concepts to wrap the travel product in advance – to anticipate customer needs. It means creating an entry point or sidebar to create anticipation, set expectations, convey satisfaction cues and engage before the buying process. We have new tools and techniques with semantics and the semantic web. This is where customer benefits and concepts can be delivered with marketing (selling), and technology (presentation) in a new and cost efficient way.” Read more