Edamam wants to be the one place where all the food knowledge of the world is organized. That’s the goal of co-founder and CEO Victor Penev, who launched the site in April, and recently updated the several hundred major recipe sites in its knowledge base to also include some smaller blog sites that add additional variety.

Semantic technology is helping the company reach its goal. “A big problem is that data about food is very messy,” says Penev. “It’s hard to find something, what you find often contradicts other information of what is good for you and what the calories are. So we set out to solve that problem. We played around with different approaches but settled on using semantic technology.”

The confusion arises in part from the fact that recipe sites themselves usually just hire services to calculate nutritional data. But that may lead to mistakes when calculations aren’t undertaken with exactitude — substituting white cream for heavy cream nutritional details changes the whole profile of the recipe, he says.

So, what is that right semantic stuff? One piece of it is that, in conjunction with Ontotext, Edamam built a food ontology. An ontology can be the foundation for a lot of things, such as extracting the knowledge of the chemical composition of a particular recipe and thus inferring its flavor and texture. And Edamam means to grow its own to include various datasets such as chemical data (for flavor and texture), geolocation (for local and seasonal recipes), product data (for e-commerce). and more.

But initially, it’s taken the simple approach, with the core of the ontology focused around classifying ingredients, nutrients and food. “We have started with the simplest ontology and focused on the most common use case — mobile recipe search,” he says.

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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

Janna Hastings recently reported that ontologies have become an essential component of life science research. She writes, “Ontology has become the method of choice throughout most of biology and biomedicine for constructing and maintaining standardisations of the terminology used in database annotations.  This was the primary motivation for the development of the Gene Ontology, and remains until today a pressing and urgent requirement throughout computer-assisted science in many different fields.  This is thus the first application of bio-ontology in data-driven science.” Read more

Back in March, The Semantic Web Blog wrote an article about FIBO, the Financial Industry Business Ontology that’s on its way to being an Object Management Group series of standards. There, we explored its value as an open semantic standard that can be used by financial institutions and industry regulators, both to support conformance to federal regulatory reporting requirements and for internal business processes and risk analysis.

To continue the discussion about the operational value of FIBO, we recently spoke with key participants developing the standard: David Newman, Strategic Planning Manager, Vice President, Enterprise Architecture, Wells Fargo Bank, who is lead of the industry team collaborating on semantics OTC (over-the-counter) derivatives proof-of-concept, and Mike Atkin, managing director at the Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Council, where FIBO was born and is included as content of EDM’s Semantics Repository.

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How to help the bench biologist get value out of the wealth of life sciences Linked Data sets? Startup Metaome Science Informatics proposes to offer some help with its DistilBio semantic search and data integration technology, by streamlining the approach to posing user queries. The Distil in DistilBio stands for Data Integration using Semantic Technologies in the Life Sciences.

Metaome, which was founded by CEO Kalpana Krishnaswami and CTO Ramkumar Nandakumar as a bioinformatics services provider before transitioning to a product vendor, contains a few more than a dozen life sciences public data sets so far. Infomaticians in the life sciences space have the expertise to query such data across sets via SPARQL, but the front-line biologist isn’t necessarily an infomatician. So, DistilBio has created a query interface that makes it easier for them to ask large and complex questions in a simplified way across data sets while building a graph in the process.

“How does a user say what are the drugs used for Alzheimer’s disease and do have they have certain protein targets and are those protein targets implicated in other diseases?” says Krishnaswami. “To ask that in one shot right now is hard without working through a SPARQL endpoint using all the SPARQL syntax.”

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Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV), a great public resource that has been around for about six months now, has been updated and now includes 229 vocabulary spaces. The website states, “Welcome to LOV, your entry point to the growing ecosystem of linked open vocabularies (RDFS or OWL ontologies) used in the Linked Data Cloud. Here you will find vocabularies listed and individually described by metadata, classified by vocabulary spaces, interlinked using the dedicated vocabulary VOAF. You will enjoy querying the LOV dataset either at vocabulary level or at element level, exploring the vocabulary content using full-text faceted search, and finding metrics about the use of vocabularies in the Semantic Web.” Read more

Semantic social web application Twitris, a project of Kno.e.sis at Wright State University, recently added to its social media analysis event lineup coverage of Occupy Wall Street, and Election 2012 is set to debut in the next couple of weeks.

These join earlier efforts such as the India Against Corruption Twitris site, and across all of them users can explore the popular topics about the event in the Twittersphere for that day; see related information by clicking on a tag; browse topics by location and see how they trend across different segments of society; search and explore questions related to a topic; view sentiments associated with a particular entity in the topic set; and more.

Leading the effort is Kno.e.sis Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing director and LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar Dr. Amit P. Sheth, who coined the term citizen-sensing and has written on the topic of continuous semantics to analyze real-time data.

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A new article by Jesse Weaver corrects two misconceptions about the semantic web. The first is that the semantic web strives to create “one ontology to rule them all.” The article states, “To my knowledge, nobody has ever claimed that there should be ‘one ontology to rule them all.’ Instead, what is regularly promoted is ontology reuse and/or integration. For example, the FOAF ontology is widely used in the semantic web to describe persons; why create your own ontology when you can reuse a well-established one? Integration of ontologies allows for conciliation of perspectives, causing data that use these ontologies to become meaningfully related. Admittedly, there are some rather large, comprehensive ontologies out there, and there are some very popular and pervasive ones, too. However, there is no standard or recommendation that requires publishers of RDF data to comply with any particular ontology. You could even ignore the RDF vocabulary if you so please (yes, even rdf:type).” Read more

The US Department of Defense has funded a project called the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) that will “make real data on conflicts and insurgencies available for academic study by scholars from the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University as well as from Princeton. According to a Fast Company article by Neal Ungerleider, by making this level of conflict data available the Department of Defense can essentially ‘crowdsource’ research and analysis. Furthermore, the study may one day make vetted data from the project available to the public, opening up even larger opportunities.” Read more

If you missed the excellent live webcast introduction to SKOS by Bob DuCharme (of TopQuadrant and the recently released Learning SPARQL), the recorded webcast is now available.

You will probably find this webcast useful if: Read more

Learn the conceptual framework and principles required to apply
semantic technologies to various domains

Semsphere is offering a three-module, distance-learning course called, “Intro to Semantic Technologies, Linked Data, and Ontologies,” and SemanticWeb.com is pleased to announce that our readers get a 10% discount on course fees.  The course will take place over four weeks and is designed for researchers, evangelists, and hobbyists who want to use semantic technologies.

It features live, weekly webcasts, guided tutorials, course materials, interaction with the instructor, and access to recorded instructional sessions. The modules cover three core topics: semantic technologies, linked data, and ontologies.

WHEN: 4 weeks (October 17 - November 7)
WHERE: Online
LEVEL: Introductory
WHO: Researchers, evangelists, and hobbyists who want to use semantic technologies
PRICE: $1,278
(SemanticWeb readers receive a 10% discount off the regular price of $1,420.)

SYLLABUS

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