What’s on the markup menu for the restaurant industry?

Among the schema.org tags for marking up web pages is one for restaurants, which includes item properties for priceRange, servesCuisine, place, and menu, among others. Restaurants that use the markup language to structure their data are promised search engine optimization (SEO) benefits when hungry consumers want to see what’s on the menu at moderately-priced nearby Italian eateries, for example. They might also or alternately use the GoodRelations ontology for e-commerce to better accommodate search engines, as well as mobile and desktop apps, with service details of hours, payment options, and daily menus that are accessible in up to 50 languages.

OpenMenu has a value proposition around structured data for restaurant owners, too: Providing increased exposure to Internet, mobile and web apps, via what it aims to be a global and open standard for storing, sharing and using their menus over the Internet. The technical details are described at its OpenMenu.org site. Initially launched in 2010, it recently updated the format to Version 1.6 and currently counts about 75,000 menus as part of its landscape – 5,000 of them actively maintained and growing at a couple of thousand a week, according to CEO and founder Chris Hanscom.

Third-party developers can harness the data too, to build applications that interact with menus, like OpenMenu Search, a way for a search engine to drill down through a restaurant’s information to the menu and menu items.

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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

Smartlogic recently released a new version of its Semaphore software, which took home the 2011 European Frost & Sullivan Technology Innovation Award. Version 3.3 adds new semantically-rich features, but the company itself has been shifting its strategy to talk about its solution less as the enterprise semantic platform and more as a content intelligence platform for identifying, classifying, extracting, analyzing and utilizing hard-to-find information from among unstructured assets in existing information management systems like Microsoft SharePoint.

Why? According to marketing VP Maya Natarajan, it’s an in to better customer access. “Whenever you think of the word semantic, there’s such a small percentage of the population that understands what it is,” she says. “But amazingly the uptake for content intelligence is so great. People immediately understand that so much quicker” — that is, she says, that content intelligence describes all the business reasons and benefits for deploying an enterprise semantic platform.

Another way to make the virtues of content intelligence even more obvious: Smartlogic is planning to introduce prebuilt starter taxonomies to kickstart the process in some vertical sectors. Meanwhile, Version 3.3 has brought to its customers features that still proclaim its semantic heritage, including a semantic visualization tool.

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Webnodes AS has announced version 3.7 of their content management system with schema.org support. According to the article, “With this release, Webnodes is the world’s first CMS with fully integrated and dynamic Schema.org support. This means that all content classes and properties in Webnodes can be mapped to corresponding types and properties in Schema.org dynamically.” Read more

Janus Boye recently shared a presentation on how semantic technologies can help content management system customers better benefit from their data. Boye states, “Today there are probably 1,000+ content management systems in use in the European Union. Very few of these are using semantics-based technologies, which holds the promise to substantially improve employee productivity and how we use our skills online.” Read more

One of the primary challenges in putting together a good content management system is building a decent permissions model. Whether a particular user or process is able to perform some kind of an action upon a resource or not can be remarkably difficult to establish, especially when there are multiple constraints involved. For an XML-based CMS, this can be even more of a challenge, because the n-dimensional nature of such a constraint model is often difficult to model in hierarchical structures.

However, RDF is far more ideally suited for this particular role. A permissions system is, at its core, a set of assertions about who can do what to what, which fits nicely with the “subject predicate object” model that RDF exemplifies. Moreover, because such models are sparse — the number of assertions is likely to be very small compared to the total potential assertions that are possible — this fits nicely into models where sparseness of data is a common characteristic (again, RDF), as compared to storing this information (expensively) in tabular fields as with a relational database.

I’m working on building an XML-based CMS (specifically on a MarkLogic platform, though I would like to keep it portable), and realized as I was working on it that while the user permissions system that MarkLogic employs is powerful, it’s not portable and there are facets that don’t fit nicely into that particular model. Thus, I decided to chase the RDF triples approach to see if that would work better for this. (The end product may very well be a hybrid approach to take advantage of fast queries, but that’s beyond the scope of this particular article).

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The publishing industry is an interesting beast: Its front-end moves rapidly to get content out to readers, but its back-end processes to deliver that information are so tightly packed that there’s not a lot of drive to make sweeping changes in those technologies or processes.

“They have to be on this schedule, so traditionally they have been slow to change their operations,” says Rachel Lovinger, associate experience director at interactive agency Razorfish.  At next week’s Semantic Web Media Summit taking place in New York City, Lovinger will be among the speakers discussing topics such as whether the industry’s tolerance for change is growing, given its need to find more innovative ways both to reach audiences and be more profitable.

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The opening keynote sessions at SemTech this week made one thing abundantly clear: Semantic technology is for business, and it’s time to start putting it in practice there.

“Semantics is a game changer in the B-to-C model,” said Bill Guinn, CTO Product Enablers, Amdocs Product Business Unit. The company’s focus is on delivering customer care and experience systems in the telco space, but Guinn’s address was centered on “applying semantics in any situation that involves complex and recurring relationships between business and consumers,” with the aim of improving revenue, reducing costs, and retaining customers.

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The world of online advertising and online conversations meet in BuzzLogic’s media index and analytics platform, an all-in-one space for analyzing, buying and reporting on campaigns. Driving the tracking and extraction of relevant web conversations and the indexing and ranking of URLs to buy ads against is the company’s NLP and cognitive analysis capabilities.

The vendor last week the vendor updated its BuzzPlanner module for honing in on targets across its index of 60 million sites and 3 billion conversations based on advertising agencies’ queries around audience and campaign objectives. “All content is social over the course of time,” says CEO Dave Hills. “So targeting ads against a conversation vs. content improves the ability to improve brand metrics.”

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Volacci Announces International SEO Capabilities That Reach Global Audiences Marketwire (press release) AUSTIN, TX–(Marketwire – October 27, 2010) – Volacci, the Web conversion company that leverages semantic web and content management system (CMS) … and more »

Volacci’s Josh Ward Delivers Conversion Rate Optimization Techniques at … Marketwire (press release) AUSTIN, TX–(Marketwire – October 13, 2010) – Volacci, the Web conversion company that leverages semantic web and content management system (CMS) …