Intel wants your mom to be a mashup artist

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.

Solution

With Mash Maker, mashups are part of the normal browsing experience. As you browse the web, the Mash Maker toolbar displays buttons representing mashups that Mash Maker thinks you might want to apply to your current page. If you click on one of these buttons, Mash Maker will apply that Mashup to your page. This might mean plotting all items on a map, annotating each flight with the expected legroom, or anything else. The cool thing about this is that you don�t need to know that there are mashups you might find useful �- the mashups come to you.

Key Differentiator

You can teach Mash Maker new mashups using a simple copy and paste interface. For example, to tell Mash Maker that you want to see the expected leg room for each of a list of flights, you need simply copy a page with airline legroom information, and paste in onto the flight listing page.

Mash Maker relies on a shared community database of information about web sites and mashups, obtained from Mash Maker users. Any user can use the built-in structure editor to tell Mash Maker about the semantic meaning of a web page, or use the copy and paste interface to create new mashups. As more users use Mash Maker, the database gets smarter, allowing Mash Maker to better understand how data is connected and suggest more appropriate mashups to users. In essence, Mash Maker uses the power of the community to enter the semantic web via the back door�

Demo videos of Mash Maker are available on the project web site. Since the service is not yet fully public, you can register today and get on the preview waiting list.

Remarks

First, I’m surprise to see a mashup software project came from Intel — a company that I often consider as a hardware company. Diversify its technology portfolios is probably a smart business move in this hyper competitive market. Second, I’m happy to see mashup is about to reach its mainstream adoption stage. Gartner’s hype cycle predication on mashups seems to be accurate. Services like Mash Maker are essential for reducing technology barriers between mashup API and non-developer web users. Third, Mash Maker complements other emerging mashup technologies and helps to create a new market that will be driven by information extraction, knowledge fusion and web-based information sharing. Armed with mashup tools, soon everyone can be an artist.

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