OneBigWeb

Some time back, Mozilla Labs introduced a interesting new firefox extension called Ubiquity. You might have seen the video. Essentially, what it allows users to identify a piece of data  and then go on to perform predefined operations on them. So, they could select a term and search for it at a bunch of sites, select a address and map it etc. Interesting stuff!

But strangely, in all the attention that Ubiquity got, nobody seems to have noticed the similarities between Ubiquity and another firefox extension from AdaptiveBlue.

Adaptive Blue comes with one other interesting capability - it’s capable of recognizing a particular type of entity (a person for eg) the user has selected, and allow users to perform operations that are only  relevant to that type of entity. So if you select a person, it can offer to search for that person on linkedin or if you select a movie, it can offer to show you reviews of that movie on other sites.

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It’s specifically this kind of functionality that has got the LinkedData folks pretty excited. Zach Beauvais blogged about it on the Nodalities blog and so has Kingsley Idehen. The idea is that when the data is properly marked up (microformats, RDFa), we could easily offer exactly what Adaptive Blue offers ie. entity type specific operations.Again, this idea is not new! This stuff was precisely the motivation behind the Simile Haystack project. But it had mixed results! I will save that story for the next post.