• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

The AdaptiveBlue Approach to Semantic Web

AdaptiveBlue is developing personalization technologies that leverage semantics and attention. We are helping build the Semantic Web, but our approach is different from the traditional one.

To sum-up, we think that Semantic Web is really about leveraging existing information to create a better online experience for everyone today.

Making the Browser Smarter

Since the Browser is the hub of all our interactions with the web, we believe that Smart Browsing should be something that your regular browser helps you do. In answer to that, we developed extension technology called BlueOrganizer that adds semantics and personalization support to Firefox.

Three main ingredients of Smart Browsing are:

Structured Content: When content is structured, it means that your browser focuses on the things in the Web pages instead of the pages themselves. Books, music, movies, wine, travel destinations, video games and other everyday things should come into the spotlight.

Shortcuts: Because the browser "understands" the semantics of everyday things, it will help you get to the information faster. When looking at a book, you can find more books by the same author. When looking at a movie on Amazon you can instantly rent it from Netflix and when looking at music album on AOL you can create a radio station on Pandora. This is the power of shortcuts.

Personalization: A Smarter Web is Personalized Web. Personalization is what helps you navigate through the myriad of choices. For example, if you rent movies from Netflix and your friend from Blockbuster, your shortcuts should be different. If you choose Last.fm and your friend likes Pandora, the browser should know this. And if you like buying from Amazon the Browser should help you do that instantly from any page on the web. This is the power of personalization.

Big Picture: The Top-Down Semantic Web

BlueOrganizer is a Firefox browser extension that leverages information that already exists in the web pages to help people Browse Smarter. But in addition to this, BlueOrganizer helps users re-write the web to be more structured and smarter. SmartLinks, Widgets and RSS feeds created by the BlueOrganizer users all retain semantics of things.

As users create BlueMarks and SmartLinks the unstructured content become structured. This structured content then goes back to the web -- to blogs and social network profiles.

So the web is gradually becoming more structured. This is by no means the end; it is just the beginning of the forthcoming Semantic Web. While technologies like RDF/OWL and Microformats are evolving and companies are looking to find ways to annotate information on the web scale, at AdaptiveBlue we are focusing on the top-down approach.

This approach is considerably simpler, but it does not apply to all things. Today, BlueOrganizer knows about 20 basic concepts like books, music, wine and travel destinations. It is not a general semantic web technology. Instead it is software that makes assumptions and builds on them to generate the utility for the end user. But even today, the BlueOrganizer Denim and SmartLinks give us glimpses of the powerful Semantic Web technologies to come.

Read more about the Semantic Web in Articles by Alex Iskold