BOSTON, May 8, 2013 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — karmadata officially introduced its freemium website (www.karmadata.com) and API (www.karmadata.com/API) to the global data community at the Data 2.0 Summit held April 30th in San Francisco.  karmadata’s website enables users to find, visualize, and share data of interest to them and their social networks.  The karmadata API provides standardized linked data from the world’s data sources, allowing developers to design and build their own applications. Read more

MODENA, ITALY–(Marketwired – April 24, 2013) - Expert System, the semantic technology company, today introduces its newest solution, the Cogito Intelligence API, bringing advanced semantic functions to enable Government and Corporate Security analysts to access and exploit their most strategic sources of information.

Cogito Intelligence API is available for free proof of concept testing, with volume pricing and annual subscription levels. The API enables Government, Intelligence, Law Enforcement Agencies and enterprise Corporate Security functions to add semantic processing, text mining, categorization and tagging features to their analysis platforms and applications for faster evaluation of intelligence data. Read more

Alex Williams of TechCrunch reports, “The complexity of connecting tools in this new API economy is getting compounded by the inability to link this new breed of services so people can talk in context about the code. Application development cycles are shorter and developers are picking tools that make them more productive. To counter the increasing complexity, Tasktop Technologies, an application lifecycle management (ALM) integrator, is today launching an open-source effort called Software Lifecycle Integration (SLI) that would link the disparate tools in the software lifecycle management process. The new initiative is called M4, and if approved at EclipseCon, it will become part of an open-source project under Eclipse-Mylyn.” Read more

Kevin Fitchard of GigaOM reports, “Yummly is releasing its semantic food search technology into the wild, announcing on Wednesday that it is selling developers access to its database of more than 1 million web-sourced recipes as well as the technology it uses to parse them. The launch is timely, considering Punchfork is shutting down its API at the end of the month after it was bought by Pinterest. Several sites and apps tap Punchfork’s recipe content and search capabilities – for instance, Punchfork powered Evernote Food’s Explore Recipes feature – so it will soon be looking for an alternative.” Read more

Leigh Dodds has drafted a diagram illustrating relationships between resources in an effort to understand and describe Dataset and API discovery in Linked Data. He writes, “While there’s been lots of research done on finding and using (semantic) web services I’m initially interested in supporting the kind of bootstrapping use cases covered by Autodiscovery. We can characterise that use case as helping to answer the following kinds of questions: Given a resource URI, how can I find out which dataset it is from? Given a dataset URI, how can I find out which resources it contains and which APIs might let me interact with it? Given a domain on the web, how can I find out whether it exposes some machine-readable data? Where is the SPARQL endpoint for this dataset?” Read more

Diffbot, a web content analysis startup that we spoke with last year, has launched a new beta API called Page Classifier. Sean Ludwig reports that Page Classifier can “can reveal the page type and language behind any URL… Diffbot’s first APIs emphasized the scanning, parsing, and extracting of information from web pages. Developers could use these APIs to scan articles or homepages to pull the most meaningful content. Now it will expand its dev cred with Page Classifier, which could have a variety of uses.” Read more

This week saw a tweet from @bottlenoseapp that the petition to keep the Twitter ecosystem open has moved past the 500-signature goal. Bottlenose, the service co-founded by Nova Spivack, who created the petition and tweeted the same, uses natural language processing, semantic classification, sentiment analytics and trend detection to give users insight into the social stream in real-time (see this story for news on its most recent update).

Bottlenose integrates with Twitter via its API, just as do many other services and apps that need to post data to and get data from Twitter – whether they are semantic in nature or not. So, Twitter’s move earlier this summer that appeared to be imposing restrictions on how third party developers use its API, in the name of delivering a more consistent Twitter consumption experience, is an understandable concern.

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A new article reports, “Decibel, the semantic music metadata company and reportedly the fastest growing European company in the digital music sector, selected 3scale, the creator of Out-of-the-Box API management infrastructure, to launch, manage and productize Decibel APIs. Decibel’s mission is to power the next generation of digital music services to enhance the consumer relationship with digital music and to become the industry standard for music metadata. In that regard, the Decibel APIs powered by 3scale carry the most in-depth music metadata data you’re likely to find anywhere with more than 3 billion pieces of data on 15 million tracks from 1.1 million albums by 300,000 artists.” Read more

Ivan Herman reports, “The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published three Group Notes that, while advanced, were not completed before the end of the group’s charter. For more information, see the explanation in each individual document.” The first is a note on RDFa API: “RDFa [RDFA-CORE] enables authors to publish structured information that is both human- and machine-readable. Concepts that have traditionally been difficult for machines to detect, like people, places, events, music, movies, and recipes, are now easily marked up in Web documents. While publishing this data is vital to the growth of Linked Data, using the information to improve the collective utility of the Web for humankind is the true goal. To accomplish this goal, it must be simple for Web developers to extract and utilize structured information from a Web document. This document details such a mechanism; an RDFa Application Programming Interface (RDFa API) that allows simple extraction and usage of structured information from a Web document.” Read more

Siri’s got more company: LG Electronics Quick Voice is scheduled to make its appearance on the LG Optimus Vu Android smart phones at the end of the month. Now there are three voice-enabled mobile personal assistants, including the Samsung S Voice on the Galaxy SIII Android smartphones.

Or maybe make that four? Microsoft and Audible have teamed up: Microsoft demonstrated some of the results on the Windows Phone 8 platform at its Windows Phone Developer Summit yesterday. It showcased the capability for developers to integrate speech response and recognition directly into software programs through APIs, so that users can have interactive voice conversations with their applications.

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