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

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

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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— SOONHO KIM, MARTA IGLESIAS SUCASAS, CATERINA CARACCIOLO, JOHANNES KEIZER

Executive Summary

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) launched an ontology and associated services to manage, exchange and integrate geopolitical information at corporate level and with international partners. The geopolitical ontology is showcased in the FAO Country Profiles and Mapping Information System (FCPMIS) www.fao.org/countryprofiles, where it is used to enhance the system functionality and to integrate geopolitical information, such as, statistics, maps, feeds or documents.

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