Fuzzbot

Fuzzbot is a native Firefox plug-in that uses librdfa for it's processing back-end. It is most useful for detecting embedded semantic information in web pages and performing actions on that semantic data.

Downloads

The Fuzzbot Firefox plugin is available for the following systems:

How it works

Fuzzbot is designed to detect RDFa and display it 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.

Once you have Fuzzbot installed, a small, round silver sphere will appear at the bottom of your browser. Clicking on this icon will attempt to detect RDFa on the page you're currently viewing. If triples are detected, your Fuzzbot will open and show a little fuzzy magenta guy.

The Fuzzbot interface will show all of the semantic data detected on the page as "Triples" in a small window at the bottom of the screen. You can't do much with this data yet, but you will be able to in the future.

Fuzzbot also adds tabs to the right side of your screen. If you click on these tabs, they will expand to show you the information on the page. There is one tab for every subject on the page. Currently, only Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) is supported.

Clicking on a tab a second time closes it. Clicking on your Fuzzbot a second time closes the Fuzzbot interface.

Demos

Once you have the Fuzzbot plugin installed, you can go to the following pages and check out the things that Fuzzbot can do:

Source code

You can download the source using git: git clone http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/fuzzbot.git

License

Fuzzbot is licensed under the Mozilla Public License.

Screenshots

The image below shows a page that contains embedded Friend-of-a-Friend semantic data. The screenshot demonstrates how a text-only page can contain embedded information that a browser can use to construct user interfaces on an as-needed basis. In other words, people are listed on the page and the Fuzzbot plugin detects each person's name and finds images associated with each person. It then builds a tab that you can click, situated at the right side of the screen, that shows the person's name and what they look like. Though none of that information is shown on the screen, Fuzzbot is able to figure out how to build a small interface to show you details on each person on the page. You can also see all of the data that Fuzzbot detected at the bottom of the window.

There is also preliminary support for Dublin Core dc:title and dc:abstract elements, shown below is what digg.com looks like with RDFa support.

What's up with the name?

Ha - yeah, that one is an amalgamation of a number of concepts combined with a lack of sleep.

If you've ever played Gradius (aka: Life Force) in the arcades or on the Nintendo game platform, you're familiar with the concept of an Option. In that game, Options are tiny little robots that circle your ship, doubling, tripling, or quadrupling your firepower. You could arrange them in certain ways to work for you.

Web browser plugins are analogous to these sorts of helpers - always serving the person that is browsing the hostile web, helping you understand or interact with the virtual world around you. Parallels are drawn to the artificial intelligence that both helps and hinders humanity in the Halo series of video games. In the Halo universe, The Librarian and 343 Guilty Spark both play significant roles in helping humanity to understand it's place in the universe.

This plugin is certainly a machine, but a machine whose purpose it was to understand the human world. The names ranged from Lovebot (bad), to IHeartHumans (not so good), to Violator (a terrible play on Operator). It needed to have a warmer feel to it... and then one of our engineers said that they always had "trouble with triples"...

Which reminded the author of an old Star Trek episode - Trouble with Tribbles. Tribbles are cute fuzzy little things, that multiply almost uncontrollably. The Enterprise crew kept them as pets for a short while.

So, the name takes a fuzzy "triple" and put it in a shiny metal casing. The triple wakes up whenever it senses other triples on a page and can help you interact with the other triples. That's what the Fuzzbot icon is, a fuzzy purple triple enveloped in a metal casing.

The "Fuzz" part also eludes to fuzzy logic, fuzzy set theory, and other methods of sparse reasoning that triples enable.

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