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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Tony Hirst has written up a demonstration that maps how programming languages influence each other according to Wikipedia. He explains, “By way of demonstrating how the recipe described in Visualising Related Entries in Wikipedia Using Gephi can easily be turned to other things, here’s a map of how different computer programming languages influence each other according to DBpedia/Wikipedia (above).” See the rest of his demonstration here.

In the comments, Hirst notes, “I think one of the major benefits to be had from these sorts of visualisation is in support of a visual analytical conversation between the analyst and the data. Read more

Photo courtesy: Flickr/Florian

How’s your Thanksgiving meal planning and prep going? Hopefully well, but some day, semantic web technologies might help it go even better.

A couple years back, K. Krasnow Waterman – visiting fellow at MIT who co-chaired its Linked Data Product Development Lab that has evolved into a course – organized a lecture on the topic of the business value of the semantic web. For her presentation, she focused on catering to a consumer application — that is, how the technology could add up to improving prepping a holiday dinner.

It was fun to do it then, Waterman says, and new developments like the integration of Siri into the iPhone could push the envelope even further, adding a voice-activated intelligent personal assistant to the mix.

She describes the vision of streamlining T-Day operations via the semantic web with the initial finding of recipes online. From there, apps could take the recipes a user has selected and extract as structured data various entities – i.e., the ingredients for a shopping list. After the app pulls the ingredient list, the cook-to-be could indicate what’s already in the house (e.g., flour, salt, pepper), so it’s only searching for what’s needed. 

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