...a blog on the intersection of human computer interaction and the semantic web.
Semantic Web Browser: user is the winner!
I bet you found yourself in a situation like this. You need a phone number to call into a company quickly. You try Google luck, but no success. So you set out for a hunt in their website jungle. And seconds are ticking. Why is the contact information always on a different place? Ok, you found it. Made the call. Ready to go. Oh wait where is it? You got the address. Ouch! Webmaster was too lazy to provide you with a link to a map. So you copy the address to clipboard, open a new tab with Yahoo! maps, wait until it loads, paste it into search field, search, disambiguate and go. What a pain! And next time again - as the information will be somewhere else.
Well, actually not! It's not a web of documents any more, it's a web of data. With infrastructure like microformats or RDFa and plugins like Operator, WebCards or Wikidentity, we can do common things with a consistent user interface across the whole web very easily. Find the location of a company (or actually location of anything you're just looking at) on a map, add event to a calendar with a single click, and more to come!
And it would be a pitty to think inside the box (browser). We are standing on the beginning of a revolution of how we browse the web. The data is freed from presentation and race for great innovations in the web user interaction begins. From viewing and integration plugins to user mashups. And in the end: the user is the winner!
If you want to experience it yourself, here is a 2 minutes scenario:
Posted at 11:32PM Mar 14, 2007 by Jiri Kopsa in RFE | Comments[1]
Today's Page Hits: 5
Operator is a great Firefox extension! It's one of the more interesting uses of hCards i've seen in a while. We've also been working on mashups that leverage hCard and other microformats.
Posted by Elliot on September 27, 2007 at 03:46 PM CEST #