Semantic tech startup Ontodia took the grand prize at New York City’s BigApps 3.0 contest on Tuesday. As covered in this article, Ontodia’s NYCFacets is a Smart Open Data Exchange for the developer community that catalogs all the NYC-related data sources already present in the New York City Open Data Catalogue.

“Now that we’ve gotten this validation, we’ll charge full-steam ahead with our bigger vision for pragmatic Linked Big Open Data in NYC,” says Ontodia co-founder Joel Natividad.

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PaySwarm recently announced a new PaySwarm Alpha for developers (read our two part series about PaySwarm here). The article states, “This is a public sandbox — a developer test ground — that implements some of the newest PaySwarm REST API features.” It continues, “The biggest change was replacing the authentication mechanism that we were using for PaySwarm. We had implemented the system last year using the OAuth protocol only to find out that it made things more complicated than they need to be for the use cases that we were trying to cover. Some developers have asked why OAuth didn’t work for PaySwarm when it works for large sites like Facebook and Twitter.” Read more

Jeni Tennison has added to her discussion of microdata and RDFa with a new post on how the two might live in harmony. Tennison writes, “One of the options that the TAG put forward when it asked the W3C to put together task force on embedded data in HTML was the co-existence of RDFa and microdata. If that’s what we’re headed for, what might make things easier for consumers and publishers who have to live in that world? In a situation where there are two competing standards, I think that developers — both on the publication and consumption sides — are going to want to hedge their bets. They will want to avoid being tied to one syntax in case it turns out that that syntax isn’t supported by the majority of publishers/consumers in the long term and they have to switch.” Read more

Semantic Web and Drupal expert Lin Clark has created some excellent screencasts that demonstrate how to harness the power of open data in your own Drupal site. Clark’s article notes, “There are a lot of data providers who publish their data openly for reuse. Surprisingly, the CIA is one of them. Because of this, data geeks can take it and turn it into something that’s easy for others to reuse, using open data formats. And because it’s available in an open data format, platforms like Kasabi can load it on to their big servers and provide ways for other sites to access and query it, like a SPARQL endpoint. And because it is provided in a SPARQL endpoint, it is easy to reuse it in your Drupal site using Views. Read more

In addition to the new Semantic News Community Group, the W3C has launched a full range of community and business groups “so that developers, designers, and anyone passionate about the Web has a place to have discussions and publish documents.” The homepage explains, “A W3C Community Group is an open forum, without fees, where Web developers and other stakeholders develop specifications, hold discussions, develop test suites, and connect with W3C’s international community of Web experts. A W3C Business Group gives innovators that want to have an impact on the development of the Web in the near-term a vendor-neutral forum for collaborating with like-minded stakeholders, including W3C Members and non-Members.” Read more

The Guardian.co.uk Data Blog has released an array of data regarding the riots in London and around London in the hopes that socially aware developers will use the data to create helpful visualizations, mashups, apps, and the like. The article states, “The riots that started in London have spread across England, to Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool and Nottingham. [Tuesday] night incidents were reported from a variety of places such West Bromwich, Birkenhead, Salford and Gloucester. Fewer incidents were noted in the capital city as police deployed 16,000 officers onto the streets and many shops and offices closed early. It was a different story in the West Midlands which has now arrested 300 people since the beginning of the riots. The country has seemingly changed overnight. [Tuesday] it was announced that Parliament would be recalled and discussions about policing strategy continue. But what exactly has happened where?” Read more

A new article reports that “TSO, the company behind publishing solutions for the UK public sector, has announced the release into the developer community of what is believed to be the most feature-rich web-based SPARQL editor available, the Flint SPARQL Editor. SPARQL itself is a query language and a protocol for accessing RDF designed by the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group. Unlike many existing web-based SPARQL query-building tools, which lack abilities such as context dependent autocompletion or syntax checking, Flint encompasses many of the features developers would expect of traditional development environments and code parsers, through its web implementation.” Read more

The upcoming Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco will feature a number of innovative new products. One such product is dotnetrdf, a “free and open source project intended to be a .Net equivalent of projects like Jena and Sesame. It provides a Core RDF/Semantic Web API and a suite of tools aimed at providing the bulk of the tools and APIs a .Net developer needs to work with RDF and the Semantic Web in their applications. The presentation will highlight the major features of the project and new features coming to future releases.” Read more

A new article reports on Facebook’s recently announced Open Compute Project and what it could mean for Web 3.0: “The blogosphere is abuzz about Zuckerberg’s ‘Open Compute Project’ – his latest innovation of opening his data center’s hardware to the industry at large. The intent being to create data mines that are cheaper, more efficient and more environmentally sound. In so doing, the megalithic social network will bring down costs – and in essence – create a new golden standard, using an old business model.” Read more