The winner of the Semantic Web Challenge at November’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) was EventMedia Live, a web-based environment that exploits real-time connections to event and media sources to deliver rich content describing events that are associated with media, and interlinked with the Linked Data cloud.

This week, it will begin a one-year effort under a European Commission-funded project to align its work with the Nokia Maps database of places, so that mobile users of the app can quickly get pictures of these venues that were taken by users with EventMedia’s help.

A project of EURECOM, a consortium combining seven European universities and nine international industrial partners, EventMedia Live has its origins in the “mismatch between those sites specializing in announcing upcoming events and those other sites where users share photos, videos and document those events,” explains Raphaël Troncy, assistant professor at the EURECOM: School of Engineering & Research Center, Multimedia Communications, and one of the project’s leaders.

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A European Union-funded project to bring the web and TV closer together, called NoTube, wrapped up earlier this year. But its legacy lives on in the form of Beancounter.io from Sourcesense. The company, which was one of the project’s co-founders, had a role in the NoTube effort around integrating viewers’ social web activities as part of the platform to deliver TV content in personalized ways to users.

Leveraging the open source software, libraries and best practices that were outcomes of the project, Sourcesense has continued to move forward to deliver a commercial, scalable Web API platform that offers semantically enriched user profiles built from users’ activities performed on the Social Web. One of the first customers of its efforts is one of the largest Italian broadcast companies, RAI, which was also involved in the EU project.

Beancounter is powering a second- screen service on top of the platform to provide its 5 million viewers information on related content that may be of interest to them based on profiling their social activities (with their permission).

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How do you define a forest? How about deforestation? It sounds like it would be fairly easy to get agreement on those terms. But beyond the basics – that a definition for the first would reflect that a forest is a place with lots of trees and the second would reflect that it’s a place where there used to be lots of trees – it’s not so simple.

And that has consequences for everything from academic and scientific research to government programs. As explained by Krzysztof Janowicz,  perfectly valid definitions for these and other geographic terms exist by the hundreds, in legal texts and government documents and elsewhere, and most of them don’t agree with each other. So, how can one draw good conclusions or make important decisions when the data informing those is all over the map, so to speak.

“You cannot ask to show me a map of the forests in North America because the definition of forest differs between not just the U.S. and Canada but also between U.S. member states,” says Janowicz, Assistant Professor for geographic information science at UC Santa Barbara who’s one of the organizers of this week’s GeoVoCamp focusing on geo-ontology design patterns and bottom-up, data-driven semantics.

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LocalResponse, a new startup in the social media mobile ad space, is using semantic analysis to capitalize on real-time social data: “LocalResponse was born out of the ashes of Buzzd, a city guide that mashed up Foursquare and Twitter to help users find local hotspots. Founder Nihal Mehta learned a valuable lesson in defeat, and this week raised a $5 million round… Buzzd was a consumer facing platform, but failed to attract enough users. LocalResponse, by contrast, take the massive amount of public data being shared on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, and turns that into ad inventory.” Read more

On the way from Infochimps: Its Geo APIs that bring to developers data from open sources such as GeoNames and The National Climate Data Center, as well as licensed sources such as Locationary and Foursquare.  Now for the twist: The data marketplace is semantifying the geo data with a schema.org approach. This is just the first step in a broader plan to format all data to which its new and existing APIs provide access to in a unified way.

As CTO Flip Kromer explains it, Infochimps takes from schema.org the collection of types it defines. “That was designed for microformat markup in web pages. And we say why not take this tastefully done collection of types and make it so that it can be used by mobile phone and web developers,” he says, so that they can easily and in a unified way build on the databases to which Infochimps provides access. “That if we map that back to a JSON HTTP API world, that’s a really good thing that unlocks a lot of power for developers.”

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Not to go all metaphysical on you, but what is the ontology of good? At South by Southwest this week, DailyFeats will present its new social platform that plays off the idea: It lets people check in and be rewarded for their positive actions, via  the web, SMS, email, Foursquare and Google Talk.

In private beta the last few months (and don’t you wish you knew about it before your new year’s resolutions were just memories), co-founder and CTO Vinay Gidwaney says a conscious decision was made to classify the good, in order to assess into what categories to group a positive action and how various behaviors add up to rewards like badges. A veteran of the MIT Media Lab that launched the ConceptNet common-sense reasoning toolkit, Gidwaney explains that DailyFeats can parse out the feat to be recognized from an SMS message such as trudged a garbage bag full of old clothes to Good Will today to respond appropriately with Awesome – you did give it away.

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Personally, I believe that the Semantic Web will become mainstream in the next few years (I actually have a bet on this with some college friends). I know that this is a strong statement, but I am confident that it will happen. Mainstream is defined in Wikipedia as “the common current of thought of the majority.” Furthermore it states that something is mainstream if it “is available to the general public” and it “has ties to corporate or commercial entities.” However, how do you evaluate if something is on the verge of becoming mainstream? I propose the following metric:  inclusion at the South by South West (SXSW) Conference!

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