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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In December the Semantic Web Blog spoke with Wikidata project director Denny Vrandecic about progress on Phase 1 of the work to create a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines (see story here). At the time, Vrandecic explained that January would begin the roll-out of language-by-language editions – first up were Hungarian, Hebrew and Italian – on the Wikipedias.

Last week brought another language on board, as Wikidata Phase 1 went live on English Wikipedia, with Wikidata language links supplementing locally-hosted ones there too.  March 6 should see deployment to the Wikipedias that do not have language links.

In an important update, Phase 2 of the overall effort to centralize access to and management of structured data – which was in development as Phase 1 progressed – saw its first fruits for use on Wikidata.org (not yet on Wikipedia) earlier this month: Infoboxes.

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Barbara Starr of Search Engine Land recently posed the question, is Google hijacking semantic markup and structured data? She writes, “In 2012, I started a series, How The Major Search And Social Engines Are Using The Semantic Web, which took us to a point in time around September 2012. Since then, there have been further interesting developments. In this article, I am going to focus on recent developments that are search engine and/or Google specific, then take a further look back in search engine history with the assumption (for you history and strategy lovers,) that a successful strategy used once, may well be used again in similar circumstances.” Read more

Just as reports are coming in that venture-backed companies based in Europe recently have raised more money but in a fewer number of deals, word comes from the team at Amsterdam-based Silk that its latest seed round has brought in an additional $1.6 million.

According to new analysis from Dow Jones VentureSource, VC-backed companies based in Europe raised EUR 1.3 billion through 273 venture capital deals during the second quarter of 2012. That marked a 14 percent increase in capital raised but a 20 percent decline in deals from the same period last year, it said. Additionally, second-round deals accounted for 19 percent of deal flow and 18 percent of capital invested, down from 25 percent and 28 percent, respectively, in the year-ago period, it said.

Silk in May 2011 completed a $475,000 funding round led by Atomico, the venture capital firm headed up by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström.

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Ecosystem image via Shutterstock

As the Semantic Web Blog recently noted, 3RoundStones’ Callimachus Enterprise emerged as the winner of the Top Semantic Technology Start-up competition that was held at the Semantic Tech & Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) in San Francisco a few weeks ago. The commercially supported Linked Data Management system, now being piloted by eight companies, will this summer be released to the general public as Version 1.0.

Callimachus Enterprise is distinguished not only by its technology, but by CTO David Wood’s presentation that spoke to the real business needs of the enterprise today – including rapidly demonstrating value, in its case around exposing, connecting and visualizing disparate enterprise content – and also in that it provides a way for organizations to deal with their enterprise information in an entirely cloud-based solution. It leverages the Amazon cloud.

“A lot of companies are using cloud-based solutions for travel and expense tracking,” says CEO Bernadette Hyland. “But this is the beginning of a new wave.”

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A recent article announces that OpenText has released “a new version of OpenText Integration Center featuring an enhanced, native connector to OpenText ECM Suite 2010. Customers can help better leverage their structured and unstructured content to reduce costs and improve efficiency. OpenText Integration Center unifies access to multiple sources of disparate information from OpenText ECM Suite for applications such as business systems integration, legacy decommissioning, in-place content management and content migration.” Read more