[uf-discuss] Fuzzbot - An embedded semantic data viewer

[Manu Sporny]

Fuzzbot is designed to detect RDFa and other semantic data formats and
display them to the person browsing. RDFa is a way to embed
machine-readable data into web pages, which helps computers help you
interact with web pages in a smarter way. For example, Fuzzbot can show
you information about people that it has found on a web page - helping
you view only the data in which you're interested.

The goal of Fuzzbot is to integrate Microformats and RDFa into a common
format (JSON/RDF) which authors can then write Actions and UIs against.
What this means is that Fuzzbot will deal with higher-level semantic
concepts (People, Places, Events, Audio, Video, etc.), rather than
formats (hCard, FOAF,  etc.). Fuzzbot is primarily a test bed for UI
concepts and is not a replacement for Operator - ideally, some of what
we learn from Fuzzbot could be integrated into Operator.

http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/fuzzbot/

Screenshots are available here, for those that don't want to install the
plugin:

http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/fuzzbot#screenshots

Some of you might note that the primary UI concept behind Fuzzbot is
based on Dmitri Glazkov's Margin Marks concept[1] that he posted to this
mailing list about 3-4 months ago. It is a visual approach to displaying
semantic data.

The current release (v0.7.5) is a very preliminary version of the
software. There will be UI bugs and perhaps some operational bugs (For
example, parsing Digg.com is very slow). Firefox XPIs are available for
both Linux and Windows, here:

http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/fuzzbot/download/

All librdfa source code is released under LGPL v3, and the Fuzzbot
plugin is released under the Mozilla Public License. Source code is
available via GIT:

git clone http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/fuzzbot.git
git clone http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/librdfa.git

If you have any thoughts or questions on the direction of this project,
or where you'd like to see it headed, please discuss on the list and
we'll try to work it into the project plan.

-- manu

PS: We're also looking into creating a native C library to do
Microformats parsing, but wanted to make sure there wasn't anybody that
had already done this. Is there anybody on here that has created a
native C library for parsing Microformats?

[1] http://glazkov.com/blog/margin-marks/