LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Geni.com, the leader in collaborative family history, today announced the release of two major new features, Record Matching and Smart Matching™, which enrich family trees with relevant historical records and help users discover unknown relatives and ancestors, respectively. This will add significant new detail and color to the World Family Tree, a global initiative by Geni.com that shows how everyone in the world is related, and will help members learn more about their shared ancestries. Read more

What’s on the menu for semantic technology this week? Two vendors in the foodie field are offering up some new treats.

From Nara, whose neural networking technology is behind a service to help users better personalize and curate their restaurant dining experiences (see how in our story here), comes a new feature that should make picking a restaurant for a group dinner an easier affair. It combines users’ “digital DNA” – the sum of what it learns of what each one likes and doesn’t like regarding dining venues – to serve up restaurant choices that should appeal to the entire group across its range of preferences.

“It’s a really fun way to start getting [the service] into social,” says Nara founder and CEO Tom Copeman.

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David Meyer of GigaOM reports, “EyeEm, Berlin’s most prominent entry in the photo-sharing-app sweepstakes, has rolled out a major refresh for iOS and Android. The Instagram rival now has redesigned navigation and live art filters that should keep what was already a good-looking interface competitive, but the biggest development is the addition of a ‘Discover’ feed. Based on suggested tags and other data sources, the feed recommends photos based on friends, locations and topics. EyeEm, which is nearing a million users, is essentially now in the game of learning those users’ tastes and establishing context. Useful in itself, the Discover feed provides a window into where the company’s heading: and it’s an intriguing future to consider.” Read more

Real-time social analytics platform Topsy, which earlier this month debuted Twindex to provide insight into Twitterati sentiment on the presidential candidates, today unveils Topsy Pro Analytics. It delivers in-depth metrics based on the Twitter firehose via API to the general public. Previously, the company had API access for some metrics in a machine-to-machine interface, but nothing near the full interactivity nor access to all the measurements that are propagated into the new user interface.

Topsy’s technology was created to ingest huge amounts of authored content, with Twitter as its primary data source — all 400 million tweets a day, with an index that goes back multiple years. Topsy also does a full public scrape of Google Plus and indexes that data. It offers its own sentiment classification and dictionary scheme tuned for tweets, takes every link published in tweets and unpacks them to their native states to produce measurements around them, provides a geoinference model to see where people are communicating from (to the country level today but soon to city and state level), and also can deliver an influence and author graph.

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As the opening ceremony for the London Olympics gets underway tonight, sentiment on the event can be gauged nightly in a big way: The EDF Energy London Eye Ferris Wheel, the largest in Europe, will turn colors depending on the sentiment analysis of tweets coming out of the U.K. mentioning the Olympics.

Sosolimited, an art and technology studio helmed by three MIT grads, has written software to capture these tweets and then uses sentiment analysis algorithms to assess their emotional content. SentiStength, a program that itself hails from the U.K., is reportedly the source of the algorithms. During the day, that will be charted on a large LED next to the London Eye, and each night the data will guide the sequence of a visual lightshow around the Eye.  “That data is played back out across full color architectural lighting fixtures around the Eye and with large ground based search beams,” according to a blog posting from founder Justin Manor. It’s been reported that yellow will be the dominant color to express positive sentiment, while purple will showcase negative sentiment.

Expectations: Early on, at least, probably a lot of yellow, even if traffic is a nightmare, from a lot of outraged Brits who want to have their say over Mitt Romney’s comment about how well-prepared the city is for the Games.

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Money image via Shutterstock

Turmoil seems to be the default option for worldwide financial markets, but turns out there has been good news on the stocks front. According to a Bloomberg Businessweek article this week, U.S. stocks have had a solid 2012 so far, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 index up 9 percent this year, through Thursday, and Nasdaq up 15 percent. But the article also points out that hundreds of billions of dollars have fled the market here in the last three years.

It’s probably no surprise that skittishness reigns among average Americans, and institutional investors, too, given issues like the continuing economic volatility in Europe and more disappointing U.S. jobs data. But where many see problems, others see opportunities – including a new round of projects and vendors with semantic and sentiment analysis solutions aimed at helping investors ferret out what might be on the market’s minds.

The last couple of weeks alone saw the following unveiled:

• The EU FIRST (large scale inFormation extraction and Integration infrastructure for SupporTing financial decision making) consortium, which employs artificial intelligence to support financial decision making, launched its first running prototype of a technology that can extract and analyze sentiment about the financial domain from social media networks in near real-time. Read more

Following the recent announcement that WorldCat.org pages now include schema.org markup, OCLC has announced that the WorldCat Facebook app will now also feature Linked Data. The article states, “The availability of Linked Data in WorldCat.org has everyone here very excited. We had been anxiously awaiting the chance to make use of this new feature in our own applications, and are now beginning to try it out.”

It continues, “You may have already seen the bookmarklet developed by OCLC Developer Network staff that show how to extract schema.org markup to send information to Goodreads or to a Patron Drive Acquisitions system that accepts data via OpenURL, or the bookmarklet that extracts author URIs and uses those to query VIAF for links to DBPedia. If not, you should definitely check those out.” Read more

Remember how search engines can show nice snippets in their search results thanks to the structured data that webmasters embedded in the HTML of their webpages (RDFa, schema.org, etc)? Additionally, Facebook gains insight about user’s interest through structured data on webpages (i.e. Open Graph Protocol). Now there is a new kid on the block: Twitter.

Twitter Cards

Twitter recently introduced Twitter Cards, a way to “attach media experiences to Tweets that link to your content.” By adding structured data embedded in the HTML of your webpage, “users who Tweet links to your content will have a ‘card’ added to the Tweet that’s visible to all of their followers.” Basically, Twitter will now have a bit more of information about your webpage in order to know how to make a nice snippet in a tweet.

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Andy Tebay of The Next Web recently reported on Treum, a Korean company that is cutting through the noise to find value from social media data. Tebay writes, “A major challenge, when trying to do market research or analyze social media trends, is the massive amount of information you have to sort through. Korean startup Treum is a social intelligence company which specializes in providing high-profile companies with solutions for analyzing various elements of social media. This information can then be used to improve marketing, customer relations and more.” Read more

The latest version of the StreamGlider iPad news reader app for providing consumers with topic-oriented streams of information debuted this week. It brought with it the capability to limit hashtag or keyword searches in a Twitter, YouTube, or Flickr frame to a local area and turn on geo-awareness at the user’s request. But the bigger and more semantic event will be StreamGlider’s upcoming move to the enterprise, with the consumer app serving as a showcase to those potential customers.

StreamGlider CEO Bill McDaniel – also CEO of SemantiStar, which developed the application that The Semantic Web Blog first covered here and here – says to expect in the enterprise edition a very interesting semantic search/semantic relations engine in the background for correlating up to three data sets of semi-structured, unstructured and structured data. The company already is working with one client on a specific application of the generic technology for its custom needs, and talking to a second customer about a pilot around the idea.

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