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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The NY Times reports today that Google acknowledged it had violated people’s privacy during its StreetView mapping project. Thirty-eight states had brought a case against Google on the grounds that the project resulted in people’s passwords and other personal information being unknowingly recorded by the search giant. Google has agreed to settle it by paying a $7 million fine as well as by becoming more aggressive in ensuring that its employees’ efforts don’t violate privacy and informing the public about how to avoid having their privacy compromised.

In its discussion of the settlement, the article brings up that the way now is paved for another privacy battle, this time over Google Glass. Concerns are that Google Glass eyewear also can be used to record photos, videos and audios of the wearer’s surroundings, without the permission of the individuals featured in those surroundings. With Google Glass, users can use their voice to input commands to take a picture or make a video, as well as to take steps less likely to compromise privacy, such as search for facts about landmarks or events.

How that privacy question plays out is yet to be seen. But concerns aren’t stoping the project – which was demonstrated at last week’s SXSW conference – from moving ahead. Google yesterday announced that the glasses will accommodate frames and lenses that match users’ eye prescriptions, for example.

Getting Google Glass to respond to voice commands and searches appears to leverage capabilities it has developed for its Voice Search App for Android, as well as its semantically-driven Knowledge Graph database of hundreds of millions of entities and billions of facts, and their relationships to each other.

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What’s the latest news about rNews ? Attendees at the SemTech event in NYC Tuesday had a chance to find out.

“The future of rNews 1.0 is rNews .1.1,” said Stuart Myles, deputy director of schema standards at the Associated Press who also heads up the International Press Telecommunications’ Council’s Semantic Web work. At next week’s IPTC meeting a vote will be taken on V. 1.1, with its adoption the hopeful outcome.

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Dr. Graham G. Rong, founder of IKA LLC, and senior industrial liaison officer at the MIT Corporate Relations Office, leading collaboration between the institute and industry, has been working on a semantic web approach to social and financial analysis based on digital financial data and other information related to companies that can be found on the Internet. The approach first turns XBRL data from SEC reports into RDF format, and then links that with the relevant social information in the company’s ecosystem, to deliver more business value.

The project, which began at MIT (see our earlier story here), has advanced to the application stage, and the software is moving from a JAVA to a browser-based interface. Rong says the team also is developing a web services API for the system.

“Current XBRL technology primary collects financial data for reporting, and secondarily, as more XBRL-based financial data becomes available, it will need to effectively extract financial data for value,” says Rong. Semantic web technology lets the focus be on the latter.

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When it comes to schema.org, there’s some good news – and some ‘eh’ news.

Let’s start with the positive stuff. Today at the schema blog, the news was released that schema.org has added to its NewsArticle and related types such as CreativeWork new properties for mark-up based on the rNews standard from the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC).

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We’ve seen the big three players in the search engine space honing their semantic edge, and we may soon see one of them deploying semantic technology to sharpen image searches, too. nachofoto says it is in discussions with one of the giants (which it declines to name for now) that could result in a licensing deal to bring its ‘semantic, time-based vertical image search engine,’ currently in beta, to the big-time.

CTO Anuj Agarwal and CEO Vineet Agarwal, the co-founding brothers behind nachofoto and its focus on delivering the most recent image results, decline to name which major search engine we’re talking about.

It would, of course, be pure speculation to draw any conclusions from the fact that the Agarwals both consider the best analogy for what they’re doing as “Powerset for image search” (Microsoft acquired that semantic search engine in 2008 and it’s believed to be powering Bing Wikipedia).

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