Pragmatic Knowledge Sharing - Piggy Bank

As a user of Mozilla FireFox you are always privvy to getting and
testing new software dueto the completely open architecture of
FireFox. One example of this is the extensions architecture and
there is a whole bunch of useful extensions like Sage for RSS,
GreaseMonkey for user scripting and BlogIt for posting directly to
your Blogger blog.

I downloaded Piggy Bank two days ago and even though it is a hefty
4 Mb download for a Firefox extension it is well worth the wait,
because this is a serious attempt to have a crack at the
chicken-and-egg problem which the semantic web is faced with.
It has a very pleasing AJAX user interface which is faceted. This is
achieved by using their semantic browser Longwell.

So what you get here is a complete application server that is
overlayed on Firefox and allows you to "tag and scrape" metadata
as you go about surfing the web. So the "knowledge" collection
phase is well integrated with the web user behaviour, which is
completely incidentally from the design team at Simile.

I'd say that the Simile team has a good chance of achieving
for the semantic web, what NSCA Mosaic did for the syntactic
web by being so pragmatic. The sharing of knowledge is done through
semantic banks, which can be set up anywhere on the web or in
any organisation. Information that is not in semantic format
(e.g. RDF) can be converted by using e.g. XSLT or Javascript
screen scrapers, which themselves are sharable through Piggy
Bank of course.

And best of all is that this is Open Soure Software (OSS) itself
and based on OSS from mainly Apache. Stay tuned for a more
in-depth review!