Best Buy has now released its previously announced “Like for Like” Metis API: “BBY Open and the Metis project team are excited to announce the release of our semantically-driven ‘Like for Like’ endpoint, available now for public consumption. Like for like functionality is defined as: “for any given game, software, or hardgood SKU, display the products most like it, ordered by the number of product attributes that match’.” Read more

The University of Fribourg’s Department of Informatics has created a semantic web tool called dipLODocus_[RDF]. According to the project website, “dipLODocus_[RDF] is a new system for RDF data processing supporting both simple transactional queries and complex analytics efficiently. dipLODocus_[RDF] is based on a novel hybrid storage model considering RDF data both from a graph perspective (by storing RDF subgraphs or RDF molecules) and from a “vertical” analytics perspective (by storing compact lists of literal values for a given attribute).” Read more

AKSW recently announced the beta release of RDFaCE-Lite: “RDFaCE-Lite is simplified version of RDFaCE (RDFa Content Editor) and is published as a WordPress plugin. RDFaCE-Lite extends the TinyMCE rich text editor to facilitate the authoring of semantic documents… A demo version of RDFaCE-Lite is available at http://rdface.aksw.org/lite/. To watch a brief screencast of RDFaCE-Lite features, visit here. ” Read more

PureDiscovery has announced a new version of PureDiscovery Legal Suite which includes ‘Focus,’ a semantic search visualization tool. According to the article, “The release includes significant changes to the products workflow through a more intuitive user interface and the addition of several compelling product features suggested by the rapidly growing PureDiscovery user community. The most frequently suggested and significant upgrade to PDLS is the addition of a visual search capability the company calls ‘Focus’.” Read more

Pearson has created a semantically powered tool to help students assess their reading abilities. The article explains that the Pearson Reading Maturity Metric is “a new and more accurate measure of the reading difficulty of texts. Developed by scientists at Pearson’s Knowledge Technologies group, the new computer-based technology measures how close an individual student’s reading abilities are to what they will need to succeed in college and careers.” Read more

A new article reports that “TSO, the company behind publishing solutions for the UK public sector, has announced the release into the developer community of what is believed to be the most feature-rich web-based SPARQL editor available, the Flint SPARQL Editor. SPARQL itself is a query language and a protocol for accessing RDF designed by the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group. Unlike many existing web-based SPARQL query-building tools, which lack abilities such as context dependent autocompletion or syntax checking, Flint encompasses many of the features developers would expect of traditional development environments and code parsers, through its web implementation.” Read more

Raven has released a new tool for easily creating HTML with schema.org microdata – the Schema Creator. According to Raven, “Structured data is a way for search engine machines to make sense of content in your HTML. Google and other search engines created a structured data standard called schema.org. If you’re like most web designers or SEOs, you might find schema.org a little difficult to grasp at first. That’s why we created Schema Creator—to help you quickly build and get started with schema.org microdata. We’ve included some of the most popular schemas for you to create. After you create a schema, you can copy and paste the code to your site or add additional item properties to it.” Read more

Developers can find excellent resources at productontology.org, home of The Product Types Ontology: High-precision identifiers for product types based on
Wikipedia. According to productontology.com, “GoodRelations is a standardized vocabulary (also known as ‘schema,’ ‘data dictionary,’ or ‘ontology’) for product, price, and company data that can (1) be embedded into existing static and dynamic Web pages and that (2) can be processed by other computers. This increases the visibility of your products and services in the latest generation of search engines, recommender systems, and other novel applications.” Kmart.com and Sears.com have recently joined the ranks of big retailers using GoodRelations and RDFa. Read more

The government of Canada has released a new downloadable version of its Core Subject Thesaurus in SKOS/RDF format. According to Library and Archives Canada, “The Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus is a bilingual thesaurus consisting of terminology that represents all the fields covered in the information resources of the Government of Canada. Library and Archives Canada is exploring the potential for linked data and the semantic web with LAC vocabularies, metadata and open content.” Read more

VisualDataWeb.org has announced the release of tFacet, “a new tool that applies known interaction concepts to allow hierarchical-faceted exploration of RDF data.” According to the description, “The aim is to facilitate ordinary users to formulate semantically unambiguous queries so as to support the fast and precise access to information. Used interaction concepts are e.g. a directory tree and interchangeable columns that are already well-known from other applications. The directory tree, for example, is used to enable the intuitive exploration and selection of hierarchical facets. tFacet is based on the open source framework Adobe Flex and uses SPARQL to access RDF datasets.” Read more