Raw

Nicely interconnected stuff in today's morning reading. Denny Vrandecic picks up on RDF in Mozilla 2 (see also: Firefox Feature Brainstorming), leads into talking about using shared plugabble knowledge base(s) in apps to increase the net utility. Jo Walsh is talking about video metadata, and links to a fine quote: "Without good metadata, data is useless."  (and "Without reusable, intelligible data, software is useless..."). Not unrelated, I stumbled on this bit list of resources about extracting info from motley media material, and the Internet of Things (the title's a bit misleading, but it did make it show on my TailRank ' semantic web' subscription). Being able to extract and/or access good metadata from application data is something the Semantic Desktop folks have been working on, and Leo Sauermann discusses the practicalities in a Semantic Web PhD post ( blogging his PhD - awesome cool points!). Of course, if you're collecting all this (meta)data, you need ways of shifting it around and storing it. Andrew Newman points towards some apparently server-side oriented material at TripCom (that's Triple Space Communication) including a review of triplestores, etc, in the State of the Semantic Web (pdf, not read yet). But with desktop-local HTTP servers and richer Ajax UIs client/server is becoming an implementation detail rather than something that directly affects end-user experience, semweb kit can make it seamless.

To neatly cap this morning's material, in the inbox I found an announcement from Stefano Mazzochi of the release of Piggy Bank 3.0 and Solvent 2.0.

Piggy Bank is a Firefox extension that turns your browser into a mashup platform, by allowing you to extract data from different web sites and mix them together.

Piggy Bank also allows you store this extracted information locally for you to search later and to exchange at need the collected information with others.

Solvent is a Firefox extension that helps you write screen scrapers for Piggy Bank.

They've also got a whole load of new (Wiki-based) docs and screencasts. Very nice to see was a GRDDL engine, which makes Piggy Bank a microformat eater.