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.

Read more

IT Web recently reported, “Nokusa EI has established a partnership with Firestring – one of the most significant new information management tools to arrive in the enterprise space. ‘The system has huge potential in using the principals of social media for business,’ says Kotze. ‘What we do as humans is collaborate. While an organisation may exist in the sense of bricks and mortar, it’s the interaction of people that actually constitutes the work of the company. Firestring allows people in large organisations to interact instinctively and organically, and in addition, it brings information and people together through its semantic engine. The engine, Serendipity, automatically tags information on behalf of users, which means manual indexing to bring structure to information is no longer necessary’.” Read more

Hojoki, the cloud productivity-app aggregator with semantic tech underpinnings that The Semantic Web Blog first discussed here, is going mobile. The company’s launching the take-along version of the app, which delivers a single newsfeed of users’ cloud-connected work, for both Android and iOS platforms at The Next Web Conference’s Startup Rally event.

In the coming weeks, the mobile version will add to the newsfeed features including collaboration and push notifications, says CEO and co-founder Martin Böhringer.

As far as collaboration goes, the company is announcing in conjunction with its mobile news the addition of new social features to make that process easier. It wants to advance the cause of helping users leverage what it calls the much- overlooked Work Graph. “Our mission now is: discover the Work Graph,” says Böhringer. The Work Graph, he explains, consists of the people you’re working with, and Hojoki already know most of them if you’ve connected it to some productivity apps.

Read more

Late last week Bloomberg Businessweek reported that Facebook is working on an improved search engine with 20 developers under the direction of former Google engineer Lars Rasmussen, who joined the social network giant in 2010. According to the article’s unnamed sources, the goal “is to help users better sift through the volume of content that members create on the site, such as status updates, and the articles, videos, and other information across the Web that people ‘like’ using Facebook’s omnipresent thumbs-up button.”

As the news starts to make its way around the Web, the focus is on how this can intensify the competition between Facebook and Google, even if Facebook doesn’t directly go after the big web search enchilada. (Most seem to agree that it isn’t, at least not yet.) Better searching inside its own four walls, with its ability to use its host of knowledge about friends’ social graph data – their Likes and more – to more accurately personalize results, might encourage users to stay where they are rather than head out to search engine land, at least for some things. And at the same time let Facebook hone its advertising to profit from improved search results, too.

It would be an interesting turn of events, to have the leading search engine face the dilemma that online publishers long have been trying to deal with – keeping visitors engaged and exploring on their own sites rather than departing for Google in search of related information. As The Semantic Web Blog reported this week in a story about premium publishers deploying more semantic technology to try to solve that issue, most premium publishers lose 30 to 50 percent of their traffic to search engines.

Read more

The Open Graph protocol continues to progress: Earlier this week Facebook’s Director of Developer Relations Douglas Purdy talked about its intersection with the mobile web.

According to Purdy, more people are accessing Facebook on the mobile web than from its top native apps combined, and the game is on to help developers conquer the challenges of building for that community. One of those challenges is app discovery. At the Mobile World Congress on Monday, the company announced that it’s continuing to address the first issue with plans to extend to native Android apps the ability for Facebook’s 425 million mobile app users to discover them through Open Graph connections.

Read more

China-based semantic startup Huohua “is trying to solve a problem of ‘where and with whom to have fun’ by introducing a smart feature dubbed Instant Circle. Basically, it works like this: open the app to tap a keyword like ‘basketball’, ‘hot pot’ or ‘mountain climbing’ to locate people with the same interests around you, then live chat with them.” The company’s name translates to “spark.”

The article continues, “Thanks to the semantic search, the updates published on Huohua such as ‘get something to drink’ and ‘drink beer’ can be considered as the same interest and users can be thus connected. So based on where you are and what are you interested in, Huohua will be generating a location-and-interests-based instant circles just for you.” Read more

Digimind has released Digimind 9, “the new updated Digimind software release designed to accompany forward-thinking organizations throughout their intelligence workflows. Digimind 9 comes in response to a growing demand from companies willing to complement their CI apparatus with such features included as advanced semantic analysis, social media monitoring, and intelligence profile management. Indeed, beyond the conventional intelligence workflows, more intelligence requirements surface nowadays to leverage on social networks, unstructured data, and related analysis.” Read more

Eqentia added to its content discovery and knowledge management portal this week features to recommend additional content or people connections to end users and content curators. But it’s also been doing some other interesting work in the past couple of months on the back-end that draws on semantic technologies to help curators and content administrators of custom Eqentia-based knowledge portals with their taxonomies.

This is where YAGO (Yet Another Great Ontology), a semantic knowledge base some 2 million entities strong that extracts structured information from Wikipedia via DBpedia, comes into play. In essence, YAGO reveals Wikipedia to the Semantic Web, explains CEO William Mougayar.

YAGO gives Eqentia a list of companies and persons to to use for its auto-complete list. Once the user clicks what he wants from the auto complete list — say “Steve Jobs”– Eqentia takes “Steve_Jobs” (note the underscore) and builds a SPARQL query to DBpedia that extracts all related labels by which DBpedia knows “Steve Jobs.” As Eqentia explains it, the upshot is that Eqentia uses a local copy of YAGO to quickly search companies and persons to get a unique “key” that is shared by all 3 systems (YAGO, DBpedia and Wikipedia), and which is then used to query DBpedia for any related labels.

Read more

Adly, an advertising platform that monetizes celebrity distribution in social media (learn more here) recently announced “the beta launch of its complimentary brand and celebrity influencer dashboard, Adly Analytics. Now in testing with Adly’s top celebrities, Adly Analytics is designed to help top influencers manage and grow their audiences on Twitter.” Read more

Google is developing a new alternative to Facebook, a project currently in a limited field trial called Google+. According to an article on the project, “Google+, Facebook’s newest and strongest competitor has just been released, bringing with it some interesting architectural changes. There are two changes in particular that caught my interest, circles vs. groups/categories and following vs. frending. I believe each of these changes to be both conceptually and technologicaly closer to a more semantic and stronger social network model.” Read more