Best Buy has now released its previously announced “Like for Like” Metis API: “BBY Open and the Metis project team are excited to announce the release of our semantically-driven ‘Like for Like’ endpoint, available now for public consumption. Like for like functionality is defined as: “for any given game, software, or hardgood SKU, display the products most like it, ordered by the number of product attributes that match’.” Read more

A new resource has been announced on Best Buy’s BBYOpen blog: Metis Alpha. Like Best Buy’s earlier forays into Semantic Web use, this one started with a business problem. As the announcement states: “These days, consumers have a rich variety of products available at their fingertips. A massive product landscape has evolved, but sadly products in this enormous and rich landscape often get flattened to just a price tag. Over time, it seems the product value proposition, variety, descriptions, specifics, and details that make up products have all but disappeared. This presents consumers with a ‘paradox of choice’ where misinformed decisions can lead to poor product selections, and ultimately product returns and customer remorse.”

Read more

Photo credit: FlickR/crd!

With Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Small Business Saturday behind us, and Cyber-Monday right in front of us, it is clear the holiday season is in full force. Apparently, retailers – both online and real-world – are doing pretty well as a group when it comes to sales racked up.

Reports have it that e-commerce topped the $1 billion mark for Black Friday in the U.S. for the first time this year, with Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple taking honors as the most visited online stores, according to ComScore. Consumers spent $11.2 billion at stores across the U.S. on Black Friday, said ShopperTrak, down from last year but probably impacted by more people heading out to more stores for deals that began on Thursday night. The National Retail Federation put total spending over the four-day weekend at a record $59.1 billion, up 13 percent from $52.4 billion last year.

Not surprisingly, semantic technology wants in on the shopping action. Social intelligence vendor NetBase, for instance, just launched a new online tool that analyzes the web for mentions of the 10 top retailers to show the mood of shoppers flocking to those sources. The Mood Meter, which media outlets and others can embed in their sites, ranks the 10 brands based on sentiment unearthed with the help of its natural language processing technology.  Read more

Jay Myers at Best Buy has been working with semantic technologies for a number of years.

Traditional retailers like Best Buy are looking for opportunities to survive and grow, as competition increases and margins grow ever-narrower. Semantic Web and Linked Data solutions are part enabling transformation, even inside traditional offline retailers. Read more

The Semantic Technology & Business Conference has been underway since Sunday, with tutorials and lightning sessions catching audience interest. The conference presentations get underway today, most of them following on the heels of the opening keynotes given by Bart van Leeuwen, firefighter and architect at netage.nl; Jay Myers, web architect at Best Buy; and Steve Harris, CTO of Garlik, a part of Experian.

Best Buy, as readers of this blog know, has been diving deep into the semantic web waters under Myers’ direction for a few years now, and he shared that journey with the audience at SemTech.

Read more

Perhaps one of the most anticipated panels at next week’s Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco is the Wednesday morning session on Schema.org. Since the announcement of Schema.org just prior to last year’s SemTech Business Conference on the west coast, using the Schema.org shared vocabularies along with the microdata format to mark up web pages has been much debated, and created questions in the minds of webmasters and web search marketers along the lines of, “Which way should we go? Microdata or RDFa?”

Read more

Online advertising that leverages semantic technology is expanding to the do-it-yourself model. Infolinks today is launching its self-service in-text advertising marketplace. The company says the service is designed to speed advertisers’ ability to create in-text ad campaigns, which work in the Infolinks method by revealing ads to consumers when they hover over a highlighted keyword in relevant content and opt in to see the spot on the advertiser’s landing page.

Infolinks already delivers in-text advertising campaigns across 250 billion pages of content in its network of pre-screened web sites that it says reach over 350 million unique visitors. The company says that network consists of more than 50,000 online publishers and blogging sites.

Its full page textual analysis “relies on natural language processing, machine learning and other proprietary linguistics technologies to ensure that ads are contextually relevant to the publisher’s content and what visitors are reading at any time,” says chief marketing officer Tomer Treves, as well as to avoid inappropriate brand associations.

Read more

Jay Myers, lead web development engineer at Best Buy, acknowledged that he had to make some last-minute alterations to the presentation he gave yesterday at SemTech on the practical business uses of RDFa for search engines and beyond. They were required in light of the schema.org announcement that came at the end of last week. Myers worked the new standard for creating and supporting a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages in microdata into a slide that showed how the Semantic Web can bring equilibrium to the pendulum that tends to swing between the shiny-ball stuff of the web that’s tailored for human consumption and the back-end keyword- and metadata-stuffing that’s done for the benefits of machine-reading.

But RDFa still takes top billing.

schema.org, Myers told the audience, is “search-centric and what I believe what the Semantic Web really entails is knowledge and insight,” he said.

Read more

Just a few months ago Jay Myers, lead web development engineer at Best Buy, talked to The Semantic Web Blog about using RDFa to mark up the retailer’s product detail pages and more semantic things he’d like to do, including mashing up its online catalog data with some other data sources.

Well, in just the last week he’s been stoking the semantic data foundation – pushing Best Buy’s product visibility and discovery further along with the help of RDFa and pulling in some semantic data too, all geared to building up what he calls the company’s Insight Engine. And there’s more coming soon, as Myers’ has a personal agenda of stretching RDFa just about as far as he can in Best Buy product pages. “My goal is to make our web site as data- rich as possible while preserving the front-end user experience we have now,” he says. “It’s totally possible and I think we achieved that so far.”

Read more

Jay Myers, Best Buy’s lead web development engineer, has been a vital part of the implementation of semantic web technologies into bestbuy.com, a subject our own Jennifer Zaino discussed with Myers a few months back. Now Myers is quite literally broadening his work with a project that started with “browse widening.”

According to Myers, “The basic aim of the browse widening project is, well, to make the site wider (groundbreaking, I know). Because this activity (in theory) should take a dev about 5 minutes to accomplish, we have decided to stick a couple of extra nuggets into the “requirements” of the project. As part of my ongoing passion to turn bestbuy.com into the most data-rich website on the planet, I am augmenting the site’s HTML with RDFa and vocabularies like GoodRelations, vCard, and Google’s review vocab, integrating rich product and store data directly into the front-end user experience to maximize the machine extractability and readability while preserving the visual user experience as it stands today.” Read more