Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Intel announced a new research project called Mash Maker, which is aimed to help users to augment web page functions using mashup technology. The technical details of this project is still sparse. Nevertheless, from the available documentations, we can guess the basic capability of the service.

Problem Statement

There has been a lot of hype about mashups recently, and with good reason. Mashups are allowing us to transform the Internet from being a collection of separate website islands, into a unified intelligence in which knowledge from one web site can be automatically combined with knowledge from another.

But mashups have still not really penetrated the mainstream. My mother is not using mashup sites, and she is definitely not creating them. Even if there was a mashup out there that did exactly what she wanted, the chances are that she wouldn’t know it existed, and would be confused by it if she tried to use it.

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GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Description from Dialects of Languages) is now a W3C Recommendation. Some people prefer RDFa over GRDDL, but I think they are simply two different languages for solving similar problems with distinctive domain constraints.
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Recently The Economist magazine published two different articles that paint the vision of the future Web. In the first article — “The World on your desktop“, the author talks about how geo-browsers (e.g., Google Earth) and map mash-ups have changed the landscape of our internet ecosystem. In the second article — “The web: some antics“, the author describes a future Web that is built on metadata and semantic descriptions (e.g., RDF and OWL).