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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Kevin Fitchard of GigaOM reports, “Yummly is releasing its semantic food search technology into the wild, announcing on Wednesday that it is selling developers access to its database of more than 1 million web-sourced recipes as well as the technology it uses to parse them. The launch is timely, considering Punchfork is shutting down its API at the end of the month after it was bought by Pinterest. Several sites and apps tap Punchfork’s recipe content and search capabilities – for instance, Punchfork powered Evernote Food’s Explore Recipes feature – so it will soon be looking for an alternative.” Read more

It’s time to get semantic with your Thanksgiving meal – or what’s left of it. To that end, we toured some semantically-powered foodie services to get some ideas about what to serve up for the big day. Maybe you’ll even find some things you just may never have considered without some semantic web services making it easy to pinpoint to your tastes (literally) or nutritional concerns, or that let you bring to the table the latest delicacies getting high-fives on the social web sentiment scene.

Here we go:

• Google. For some Thanksgiving-ers, it’s simply off “to the Google,” as the dear family member in charge of our celebration says, to suss out recipes that have been marked up with rich snippets or schema.org microdata. Tired of the same old green bean casserole and plain mashed potatoes each year? Narrow the search engine to its recipes focus and you’ll find a few choice nuggets of Thanksgiving’s best vegetable side dishes – the traditional ones are there, like Martha Stewart’s garlic mashed potatoes (for a bit of a twist) and, yup, the tried-and-true green bean casserole. But you’re not likely to have thought of a pickled root vegetable salad before, courtesy of Cooking Channel TV, are you? Be prepared to set aside an hour and thirty minutes, though, to make it happen.   Read more

Yummly has announced “the launch of their redesigned website for their over 7.5 million unique visitors. Announced in conjunction with Yummly’s new revolutionary native advertising platform, Yummly Advertising, the new Yummly unveils a fresh design that delivers an easy, beautiful and innovative experience for the more than 183M cooking enthusiasts in America today… Yummly’s New Take on Cooking Launched in April of 2010 by cofounders David Feller and Vadim Geshel, Yummly’s food and recipe platform understands recipes from across the Internet and match them with its users’ tastes. Designed with simplicity and usability in mind, the new Yummly redesign mixes a scoop of high tech and a healthy dash of user feedback to provide a vastly improved user experience. The company will also be rolling out additional features and enhancements to the site over the next few weeks.”

Included in this update, Yummly has improved the site’s social integration: “As part of their individual settings, users can utilize the pervasive Yum button to share their discoveries and favorite recipes on Facebook. Simply ‘Yum’ a recipe and that endorsement will seamlessly appear as an update on the user’s Facebook Timeline and Newsfeed through Facebook Open Graph.” In addition, “Yummly Advertising’s native online advertising platform features integrated, contextual and useful ad placement within recipe search results, providing the Yummly cooking community with comprehensive brand suggestions.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Yummly

Feastie, the latest in a long line of recipe search engines has decided to turn away from semantic recipe search in favor of a keyword searchable index of over 1,000 food blogs. The company states, “The image-driven Feastie search engine allows users to explore and discover thousands of recipes from the original food blog photography… Unlike other search engines, the database at Feastie is updated constantly, adding hundreds of new recipes to the index daily, ensuring that users will find something new every time they search. The blogs range from gourmet cuisine and pastry to family-friendly meal planning or shoestring budget cooking. Users can follow their favorite blogs in their profile to be sure they never miss a recipe from their favorite blogger.” Read more

The news of Facebook’s acquisition of mobile photo-sharing service Instagram for $1 billion this week may be fueling the dreams of tech start-ups of every stripe, including those in the semantic tech community. In fact, they may have even greater reason to be inspired: A recent  report has it that Instagram has been slowly rolling out an Open Graph integration for the app accomplished in collaboration with Facebook for seamlessly publishing photos to users’ Timelines in what may be the first of similar partner-deals down the road.

Other startups infused with semantic tech smarts may be on high lookout for funding opportunities as an important part of making those dreams come true. Thomson Reuters and The National Venture Capital Association this week released funding stats for the first quarter of 2012 that could put a bit of a damper on things: It found a 35 percent decrease by dollar commitments and a 9 percent decline by number of funds, compared to the first quarter of 2011. But, according to a statement by Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA, venture firms “appear to be more optimistic about the fundraising environment in 2012.”

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Kevin Fitchard reports that Yummly has raised $6 million to build its digital kitchen. Fitchard writes, ” Yummly earned its toque by creating a semantic search engine for recipes, but the 2-year old Silicon Valley startup has bigger culinary ambitions. It wants to expand beyond recipe search and recommendations to create what CEO (that’s for Chief Eating Officer) Dave Feller called a ‘complete digital kitchen platform.’ On Wednesday Yummly announced it had raised $6 million to help build that kitchen.” Read more

A new article reports, “Semantic recipe search engine Yummly is tuning its search features to include a new way to search specifically for recipes that are ‘spicy’ just as it’s hitting a major milestone. After coming out of beta in June 2010, the company says it’s now doing half the unique visitors of Epicurious.com, the popular search engine for Bon Appetit, Gourmet and Self magazine recipes. In July, year-old Yummly reached 2 million unique visitors in a month for the first time, the company is set to announce Wednesday.” Read more