Today sees the launch of Meritora, the first commercial implementation of the universal payment standard PaySwarm (initially discussed in this blog here and here). The creation of Digital Bazaar, the company founded and CEO’d by Manu Sporny – whose W3C credentials include being founder of both the Web Payments Community Group and JSON-LD Community Group, as well as chair of the RDF Web Applications Working Group – Meritora is designed to ease what is still a surprisingly arduous task of buying and selling on the web. The service is starting with a simple asset hosting feature for helping vendors sell digital content on WordPress-powered sites, and support for decentralized web app stores so that app creators can put their work on their web sites, set a price for them, and let them be bought there, at a web app store, or anywhere on the web.

The name Meritora points to the service’s underlying purpose of rewarding greatness, coming from the bases ‘merit’ and ‘ora,’ the latter of which has been used across a number of cultures to express a unit of value, Sporny says (noting that it means ‘golden’ in Esperanto, and was also used as a unit of currency among Anglo-Saxons). That’s a big name to live up to, but the service hopes to do so by making Web payments work simply, securely, quickly, with low fees and no vendor lock-in for buyers and sellers on the digital content scene.

There’s Linked Data to thank for what Meritora, and PaySwarm, can do, with Sporny describing the system as “the world’s first payment solution where the core of the technology is powered by Linked Data.”

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The W3C has announced that eleven specifications of SPARQL 1.1 have been published as recommendations. SPARQL is the Semantic Web query language.  We caught up with Lee Feigenbaum, VP Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics Inc. to discuss the significance of this announcement. Feigenbaum is a SPARQL expert who currently serves as the Co-Chair of the W3C’s SPARQL Working Group, leading the design of SPARQL.

Feigenbaum says, “SPARQL 1.1 is a huge leap forward in providing a standard way to access and update Semantic Web data. By reaching W3C Recommendation status, Semantic Web developers, vendors, publishers and consumers have a stable, well-vetted, and interoperable set of standards they can rely on for the foreseeable future.”

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OWL, the Web Ontology Language has been standardized by W3C as a powerful language to represent knowledge (i.e. ontologies) on the Web. OWL has two functionalities. The first functionality is to express knowledge in an unambiguous way. This is accomplished by representing knowledge as set of concepts within a particular domain and the relationship between these concepts. If we only take into account this functionality, then the goal is very similar to that of UML or Entity-Relationship diagrams. The second functionality is to be able to draw conclusions from the knowledge that has been expressed. In other words, be able to infer implicit knowledge from the explicit knowledge. We call this reasoning and this is what distinguishes OWL from UML or other modeling languages.

OWL evolved from several proposals and became a standard in 2004. This was subsequently extended in 2008 by a second standard version, OWL 2. With OWL, you have the possibility of expressing all kinds of knowledge. The basic building blocks of an ontology are concepts (a.k.a classes) and the relationships between the classes (a.k.a properties).  For example, if we were to create an ontology about a university, the classes would include Student, Professor, Courses while the properties would be isEnrolled, because a Student is enrolled in a Course, and isTaughtBy, because a Professor teaches a Course.

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PaySwarm advocate Manu Sporny recently spoke to Tom Simonite about a web standard for online payment. Simonite writes, “Over the past few decades, a handful of open standards for rendering and sharing text and imagery between computers—better known as the World Wide Web—have helped upend businesses worldwide. But these Web standards do not cover ways of transferring money or selling content, leaving us to fumble for credit cards and PayPal account details when it’s time to cough up. That could be set to change. A group affiliated with the body that maintains Web standards hopes to establish an open standard for transferring money online. If the plan is successful, Web browsers could come with features that make it much easier to buy and sell things or transfer funds over the Internet.” Read more

Some in the Semantic Technology community have pointed out that from a development perspective, Semantic Technologies are well suited for an agile approach to programming, and we will be discussing that idea more in future here at SemanticWeb.com. Today, however, we’re taking a look at some novel thoughts on agile development of a standard, thanks to guest contributor, Andreas Gebhard. He is Director, Editorial at Getty Images, and Board member of the IPTC.

We caught up with Gebhard at the recent Semantic Technology & Business Conference in New York, where he initially shared this idea with us.

He has expanded on these ideas in a post on the Getty Images blog. As Gebhard says, “I want to tell you the story of how we got there in just about a year — tremendously fast, in the world of standards.”

We re-print the post in its entirety below with thanks to the author and Getty Images.

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Doc Sheldon of Search Engine Watch reports, “Tim Berners-Lee first spoke of a Semantic Web at his address at the first World Wide Web Conference in 1994. Given the technical level of the audience, his presentation was, for the most part, met with excited nods. The Web Berners-Lee described was a far cry from the library-style repository of the Web at that time, but the concept wasn’t so far-fetched, at least to the listeners with a more visionary nature. ‘Semantic’, however, is a qualifier that means a great deal in this context. It demands that a machine, or more accurately, the software that drives that machine, must understand the information in the way it was intended. Let’s face it: most of us know a handful of human beings that are challenged in that regard.” Read more

Bill Culifer of WebProfessionals.com recently shared an audio interview with web expert Manu Sporny. Culifer writes, “In this fourteen minute interview with Manu Sporny Founder, CEO of Digital Bazaar a leader in the democratization of finance and payments on the Web we learn about Linked Data and why Web professionals should care.” The interview covers: “The history of Linked Data; Tim Berners Lee vision for Linked Data. How data is locked in silos; How Linked Data aims to free the data; How Linked Data differs from the Semantic Web; Examples of Linked Data; Benefits of Linked Data and why Web professionals should care; Recommendations for Web Professionals and how to get started; Linked data plugins and tools; Linked Data resources and best practices; The importance of education and advocacy.” Read more

Michael Vizard of Programmable Web recently wrote, “While just about everybody would agree that the Internet of Things within the context of machine-to-machine (M2M) applications is one of the next big things on the Web, turning that vision into reality has been problematic because of the lack of standards. To address that specific issue a cross-industry group called The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) has been promoting the adoption of a oneM2M initiative that promises to harmonize various standard initiatives in a way that should make the Internet of Things truly programmable.” Read more

Matt Brian of The Next Web reports, “In an attempt to create the ‘definitive resource’ for all open Web technologies, Apple, Adobe, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera have joined the W3C to launch a new website called ‘Web Platform.‘ The new website will serve a a single source of relevant, up-to-date and quality information on the latest HTML5, CSS3, and other Web standards, offering tips on web development and best practises for the technologies. According to the W3C, the website will also display the status of a particular technology’s standardisation and cross-browser implementation.” Read more