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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Benjamin J. Balter recently opined that WordPress needs to start better expressing content in a machine readable format. Balter begins with an explanation of REST: “The idea is simple: a URL should uniquely identify the underlying data it represents. If I have a URL, I shouldn’t need anything else to view or otherwise manipulate the information behind it. WordPress, for the most part, does this well. Each post is given a unique permalink (e.g., 2012-12-15-why-wordpress…) that always points to that post. The problem is, however, in WordPress’s sense, it points to the display of that content, not the content itself. Read more

What’s the latest news about rNews ? Attendees at the SemTech event in NYC Tuesday had a chance to find out.

“The future of rNews 1.0 is rNews .1.1,” said Stuart Myles, deputy director of schema standards at the Associated Press who also heads up the International Press Telecommunications’ Council’s Semantic Web work. At next week’s IPTC meeting a vote will be taken on V. 1.1, with its adoption the hopeful outcome.

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If you would like your company to be considered for an interview please email editor[ at ]semanticweb[ dot ]com.

In this segment of our “Innovation Spotlight” we spoke with Andreas Blumauer, the CEO of  Semantic Web Company. Semantic Web Company is headquartered in Vienna, Austria and their software extracts meaning from big data using linked data technologies. In this interview Andreas describes some of the their core products to us in more detail.

Sean: Hi Andreas. Can you give us a little background on your company? When did you get started in the Semantic Web?

Andreas: As an offspring of a ‘typical’ web agency from the early days of the internet, we became a specialized provider in 2004: The ‘Semantic Web School’ focused on research, consulting and training in the area of the semantic web. We learned quickly how the idea of a ‘semantic web’ was able to trigger a lot of great project visions but also, that most of the tools from the early days of the semantic web were rather scary for enterprises. In 2007 we experienced that information professionals began to search for grown-up semantic web solutions to improve their information infrastructure. We were excited that ‘our’ main topics obviously began to play a role in the development of IT-strategies in many organizations. We refocused on the development of software and renamed our company.

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Comparison engine FindTheBest recently released a widget that can help online content creators integrate its data-driven topic comparisons into their pages. An author writing a story about the accounting profession, for instance, can add a widget that provides a single or multiple-product data view of accounting software, or a ratings chart, with customizable data fields via a widget that can be embedded from its site or an integration with WordPress.

It’s part of the service’s continuing strategy to drive deeper distribution relationships for its curated topic-search engine that recently added more social and more semantic-like capabilities in the way of crowd-sourcing and soft joins of its data sets (see story here). “We help you with suggestions,” says CEO Kevin O’Connor, co-founder of DoubleClick. “Then we add some different info-graphics” – maybe a scatter-gram of all screen sizes vs. price or screen sizes vs. battery life for smart phones, for instance, in a story about, say, Apple’s latest iPhone plans. “That lets you pull in industry wide information very quickly into interesting graphics.”

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Editor’s Update Jan. 19: DBpedia, Wikipedia and company are all back online, while some lawmakers have taken their support for SOPA and PIPA offline. Republican Senators Roy Blunt and Marco Rubio have withdrawn their support for the Protect IP Act, and Representative Lee Terry (R-Neb.), an original co-sponsor of SOPA, also has asked to have his name removed from the bill.

It’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) day. At 8 a.m. EST  OpenLink Software began a 12-hour blackout of the following sites it controls in support of Wikipedia, Reddit and others spearheading the online protest against the legislation:

• http://dbpedia.org
• http://dbpedia-live.openlinksw.com
• http://lod.openlinksw.com
• http://uriburner.com

Founder and CEO of OpenLink Software Kingsley Idehen yesterday directed interested parties to a Linked Data-driven poll for the opportunity to vote on taking this step, and the ayes, so to speak, had it.

Turn to any of the above sites and you’ll see:

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Andreas Blumauer reports that the PoolParty team has released an improved version of their WordPress plugin which enables linked data enrichments. Blumauer writes, “Users and developers benefit from: automatic annotation of all blog entries displayed as tooltips; a comfortable search facility with auto-complete over all concepts from the linked thesaurus including semantic search over the whole blog; an integrated thesaurus browser; plus a corresponding linked data frontend including RDF/XML serialization of the underlying thesaurus + SPARQL endpoint.” Read more

According to a new article, “Federated Media Publishing, which in conjunction with recently acquired Lijit Networks, Inc. powers the Independent Web, announced an agreement with Automattic to provide advertising representation rights to the WordPress.com community of more than 24 million blogging sites.” Read more

PoolParty, a sponsor of the upcoming SemTechBiz UK conference, has released a free linked data plugin for WordPress. According to PoolParty, “In a recent video Matt Cutts from Google announced that smart internal linking is one of the key strategies for SEO in 2011. So PoolParty Team has released a freely available plugin for WordPress (download plugin) which consumes linked data and offers features for any WordPress driven blog or website making it more understandable and helping to improve interlinking articles. The website will be improved by linking posts with key terms and key terms with other key terms.” Read more

Eqentia, a semantic entry point into personalized content discovery and knowledge management, today unveils Version 2.0 of its technology. Some of the features, such as the addition of the Personal Stream that gives users eight ways to collect and curate content, have been in soft launch since February. Others, such as a revamped UI and Self-Service Portal creation, are available for the first time.

An enhanced user experience has to be at the heart of special-purpose curatorial platforms, says Eqentia founder and CEO William Mougayar.  That said, while Eqentia may not talk up its semantic back-end to clients, it’s what’s there that adds to the value they’re looking for: “What’s really valuable when we talk to clients is that they like that we tag everything properly, which happens because we know the semantic structures inside and can use the taxonomies.”  In fact, Mougayar says Eqentia has been building up the back-end by incorporating Semantic Web standards such as OWL for linking its own taxonomies and making it easier to reuse parts of them, so that Eqentia can more readily configure new topics or domains.

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