This Little Piggy Went to Market

I read about Piggy Bank the other day and was intrigued because it appears to incorporate many of the ideas that I have had about how to transform the web into something more structured without “boiling the ocean”. In a nutshell, Piggy Bank is a Firefox extension that lets you consume RDF data sources, screenscrape HTML so that it looks like RDF and store items so obtained in a data store for browsing and sharing. For much, much more information read their very interesting whitepaper.

I tried to install it just now, but unfortunately I couldn’t get it to work. The documentation says that I should see a “data coin” in my status bar that lets me access RDF data sources and screenscrapers, but this icon didn’t show up when it was supposed to. Perhaps something to do with my configuration (billions of extensions installed), but this kind of stuff has to Just Work so I didn’t pursue it further than that.

Just from the info in their whitepaper, there are two things that I really like. One is the idea of using reusable HTML screenscrapers to create structured data. If tools that consume structured data are to become widespread, we need to seed the ecosystem somehow, and this strikes me as a great way to do so. The other is the ability to add tags to tags. I read Clay Shirky’s “Ontology is Overrated” paper, and his thesis that you can apply Google-style techniques to tags without requiring more formal taxonomies is actually pretty darn convincing. But I still think that something is missing and that being able to mark up the tags themselves would plug a lot of holes and make this approach an order of magnitude more powerful.

Now the bad news: it’s written in Java and uses an RDF datastore as a backend. I love Java as a programming language but I remain to be convinced that it is a good choice for a real-world consumer application. And if you want to store a lot data in a scalable manner, you simply need to use an SQL database. And this comes from a guy who worked for years as a developer for an object-oriented database company. Perhaps most serious is the lack of a compelling reason for adoption. On his blog, Stefan Mazzocchi , one of the project founders, speculates that Piggy Bank might be a killer app. In my opinion, however, a platform is never a killer app.

The future looks bright, but it ain’t here yet.

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1 Comment »

1. I installed it ok. But Firefox kept popping up with the message ” A script is causing your browser to run slow” so alas I had to uninstall it.

   Comment by Geoff — 5/27/2005 @ 5:55 pm

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