| Last Modified On : | September 25, 2007 11:21 PM PDT |
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Intel Mash Maker is an extension to your existing web browser that allows you to easily agument the page you are looking at with information from other sites.
To go into more detail, we can say that Mash Maker is:
- A browser for the Semantic Web
- A tool for easily creating mashups
- A predictive engine that suggests mashups you might want
- A colloborative tool for the extraction of semantic meaning
- A user interface that annotates web pages with additional informaton
- A programming language whose primitives are web sites
- A platform for interactive widgets that visualize semantic content
- A browser plugin for you existing web browser
Normal web content is designed to be read by humans, not machines. The standard HTML descriptions of pages describe how pages should look, but they rely on the intelligence of a human to understand what the information really means.
The Semantic Web is a concerted effort by many organizations to move to a world in which content on the web can be understood by machines as well as humans. The advantage of this is that if your computer understands what content means then it can do interesting things with it. The long range visions for what this might enable are very compelling, as exemplified by Tim Berners-Lee's much-quoted article in Scientific American. In the more mundane world of the here and now, the Mash Maker videos page gives some examples of what kind of things we can do with semantic content.
Intel® Mash Maker is a browser for the semantic web. You can use it just like you would use your normal web browser, except that, unlike your normal web browser, Mash Maker understands the semantic meaning of the pages that you are looking at. This allows it to provide alternative, richer, representations of data, and allows it to intelligently combine the data you are looking at now with other information that you might find interesting.
Mash Maker is not the only browser for the semantic web. Wikipedia has a list of other semantic web browsers. We do however believe it has an interesting combination of features that makes it particularly compelling for end users.
One of the most interesting things that we can do with semantically understood web content is combine it with other web content. For example, one might want to compare the prices on two different stores, plot items from several pages on the same map, and display reviews from one site alongside objects for sale on another site. Th e process of composing websites together like this has come to be known as a Mashup.
Mash Maker makes it easy to create new mashups, using a simple copy and paste interface. To combine site A with site B, all you need to do is browse to site A, click copy, browse to site B, click paste, answer a few questions from Mash Maker, and you are done. In the long term, our aim is that the default answers to these questions will almost always be the right ones, allowing you to create the mashup you want in only three clicks. In the short term however, you will often want to adjust the settings in order to get things how you want them.
In some cases you don't even have to use copy and paste. Mash Maker looks at pages you have looked at recently, and if it thinks that they could be usefully mashed together then it will suggest this mashup without even asking you.
Often the hardest part of using mashups is knowing that you want one. It is doubtless the case that there are many mashups out there that would be very useful to me, but if I am going to use one then I have to know that the information that mashups provides is something that would be useful to me, and I have to somehow find that mashup. Mash Maker attempts to solve this problem by having the mashups come to you.
As you browse, the Mash Maker toolbar suggests mashups that it believes that you would find useful for the current page. The mashups that Mash Maker suggests are based on the mashups that you applied to pages in the past, the pages that you have browsed recently, and the mashups that other users appreciated having applied to similar content. The intention is that, as more users use Mash Maker, it becomes smarter at anticipating what information you might want and providing it to you before you even knew you wanted it.
In an ideal world, all web pages would come complete with perfectly written RDF descriptions of their meaning, and perhaps that will eventually be the case. For the moment however, the vast majority of information on the web is available only in a representation intended for humans. As a result, projects that wish to perform high level operations on web content have generally worked by extracting data from the existing HTML. A human provides the computer with a description saying what the different elements on a page mean. Many extraction tools exist for performing html data extraction, several of which have considerably better user interfaces than what Mash Maker has at present. In particular, the extractor interface used by Mash Maker is very similar to that of Solvent.
What makes Mash Maker's data extraction system interesting is its collaborative approach. All extractors are stored in a shared central repository and any user can interactively edit the extractor for the page they are currently browsing. In this respect, Mash Maker draws inspiration from Wikipedia, which has shown that if you give a large group of people edit acce ss to a large database, the results will generally be good. Even if some users misbehave and vandalise data, it is likely that other users will fix it. Like Wikipedia, Mash Maker has a revision control system, allowing any user to revert any extractor to any previous version if vandalism is discovered.
The current Mash Maker scraper interface requires that the user be reasonably skilled in order to use it. In particular, users need to understand XPath. We intend to make future versions of the extractor interface considerably more user-friendly.
Users are used to existing interfaces of the web sites they use. Mash Maker tries to change the existing browsing interface as little as possible. Rather than extracting information from a page and presenting it in an entirely new interface, Mash Maker instead augments the existing interface with existing information. This may take the form of adding additional widgets to data items, or adding new panels to the page, or even filtering out items on the page that the user is not interested in.
Mash Maker originated as an interactive programming language and only later evolved into becoming a semantic web tool. The core Mash Maker language (not all of which is currently exposed through the user interface) is Turing Complete, meaning that it is capable of expressing any computation that can be described in other languages. It is thus possible to combine web sites in extremely powerful ways. Despite this power, Mash Maker allows one to write programs entirely inside the web page, using simple operations such as copy and paste, without ever having to write code.
The first things that new Mash Maker users typically play with are the interactive widgets, such as table, map, and annotate. These are examples of interactive widgets that can present semantic content to a user in a friendly way. The table widget can present anything that has a collection of items with common properties. The map widget can represent arbitrary collections of items with addresses. The annotate widget can annotate anything with a URI.
While the general API behind these widgets is not currently exposed to users, our intention is to provided a generic API that allows any programmer to write new javascript widgets that can visualise information described as RDF.
Mash Maker is implemented as a browser plugin. This not only allows us to preserve the existing browsing experience as much as possible. It also makes it possible for Mash Maker to manipulate information that could not or should not be manipulated by an external server - include highly private information, information stored on an intranet, information requiring one to be signed in. In this sense, Mash Maker is similar to Piggy Bank, which also operates as a browser plugin.
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