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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Whisk, the U.K.-based service for matching online recipes with online ingredients-shopping, went live in a big way at year’s end, with a partnership with TV channel and recipe publisher Food Network. As its iOS and Android apps rolled out to accompany its browser plug-in, Food Network in the U.K. featured a button on its recipe search engine for a widget that taps into the service, which is underpinned by semantic technology and a cloud infrastructure. A recent second round of angel funding also has taken the service’s total investment to more than £500,000.

Whisk co-founder Craig Edmunds reports about 12,000 app downloads so far, and about a 1.5 percent steady click-through from the button on the publisher’s site – right where it expected to be at this point, he says. Getting the big-name Food Network signed on actually changed plans a bit for the service, which The Semantic Web Blog covered earlier here, and whose co-founder Nick Holzherr was a keynote speaker at the London SemTech event.

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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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Vertical Search Works has launched VS4Food, “a mobile, vertical search engine for all things food related.  Users enter a search query and generate results specific to food, food products, recipes, restaurants and specialty food retailers.  Searches can be launched by voice activation or through the phone’s touch screen or keyboard.” Read more

Locu, formerly known as Goodplates, has closed a seed funding round in which they raised $623,000. CEO Rene Reinsberg noted that investors were diverse and came from both the west and east coast: “That includes Boston angel investor and HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah (also an investor in Xconomy), as well as Factual CEO Gil Elbaz, Cloudera founder and chief scientist Jeff Hammerbacher, and Google engineering manager Bruno Bowden on the West Coast. Reinsberg says the startup, whose founding team is largely techies, used AngelList to find many of its seed investors.” Read more

Professor Deborah McGuinness of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has tinkered for years with applications designed to help people pair the right wine with the right food. McGuinness has used her applications, which she has been toying with since the mid 80s, to help her classes understand the basics of web ontologies. Her latest app is “an exceptional example of what the future of the World Wide Web, often called Web 3.0, might in fact look like.” Read more

The semantic web has a lot in store for businesses, researchers, and government in 2011. But what about the rest of us? One tasty way everyday people can benefit from web 3.0 is through mashups. The three food-finding mashups featured in this article are semantically-powered resources for hungry consumers (no pun intended). Read more

The Semantic Web has enormous potential to change the way we receive, understand and use information. The Web as we know it today connects pages of information one dimension at a time to each other based on some simple things you ask it to perform (e.g. keywords like “dog” & “food”). Of course you get some pages that talk about dog food. But many others that simply happen to have the words dog and food somewhere on the page yet talk about all kinds of things other than “dog food.” A Semantic Web makes sure the concept of dog food is present first, and then identifies other facts, experts, types, uses, recipes, ingredients, etc., about dog food. A Semantic Web is smart in that it presents a better set of results, in context and is ready to solve problems, answer questions directly, infer, resolve, discover and analyze in ways that the current web was never designed to do.    

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Introduction

Semantic Universe has begun producing linked data for its Enterprise Data World and Semantic Technology Conferences. There were several motivations behind this effort.

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Controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and thesauri have been in use in a wide variety of organizations for decades. With the information explosion fueled by the internet, the importance of these organization structures has become more and more apparent. The problem isn’t where to find vocabularies or how to build them; on the contrary, enterprises typically find that they have several mini-vocabularies, each tuned to a special purpose or business need, just as so-called "folksonomies" have appeared in popular websites. The problem enterprises are facing today is how to manage all these vocabularies in a coherent way and eventually to integrate them so that they can make cross-references from one to another.

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