Piggy-Bank is a new extension for the Mozilla Firefox browser that allows you to easily browse the semantic data linked to from regular web pages. I’ve seen some other projects along these lines, but they tend to be focused on a particular flavor of RDF data (such as Joel’s FOAFer extension, or Christopher Schmidt’s DOAP Viewer extension).

I’m still not quite sure how Piggy-Bank works, but at the least it’s scraping web pages for any embedded links that have well-recognized types in the Semantic Web, such as “application/rss+xml” (for RSS feeds) and “application/xml+rdf”. It then follows those links and parses out the “information tidbits” from those sources, and presents that information to you in a sidebar. Piggy-Bank attempts to categorize the tidbits into high-level categories, such as “News” for RSS Channel and Item resources, or “Contacts” for FOAF’s “Person” resources. You can save the tidbits of interest in a local database (“My Piggy Bank”) and search through them later; Piggy-Bank remembers the original source of the data and allows you to annotate them with comments as you desire.

In response to the question, “Why was [Piggy-Bank] built?” the developers offer the simple answer:

“Already many researchers and organizations have gotten excited about the promises by the Semantic Web. Through the deployment of this Piggy-Bank extension, we would like to get end-users excited about the Semantic Web, too.”

I’m not sure that Piggy-Bank is the tipping point that’s going to get end-users “excited” about the Semantic Web, but it certainly was easy to install and use.

There are still a few kinks in the system. For example, I found that a lot of pages that do in fact contain links to bunches of semantic data (such as Bob DuCharme’s rdfdata.org site) aren’t properly “scraped,” presumably since they don’t annotate the links using the expected link types. The developers might reasonably argue that this is by design, and that it would be too costly to follow all possible outgoing hyperlinks to try to determine whether they point to any useful RDF data. Nevertheless, it might prove useful to find ways to relax whatever rules that Piggy-Bank is currently using so that it’s able harvest even more semantic data from pages that aren’t necessarily playing by the rules. Another kink is that (at present) it only seems to handle RSS 1.0 feeds. Again, the developers might reasonably argue that since RSS 1.0 is the only version of RSS that parses as “legitimate” RDF, it’s OK for Piggy-Bank to stumble over the RSS 0.9x and 2.0 flavors. That was little solace to me as I had to wade through a number of my friends’ blogs’ RSS feeds before finding one that was actually available in RSS 1.0 format.

I’m anxious to see where this project goes over the coming year.

O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com has posted a new article by Curt Hibbs about Ruby on Rails. An especially nice touch was that Curt decided to use Windows as the operating system for this installation. Since most of the existing Rails documentation focuses on its installation and configuration on Unix or Mac OS X, it can sometimes be difficult to find Windows-centric documentation for Rails.

The article is a tutorial that covers both the installation and setup of Rails, as well as how to develop a sample application. Curt’s very thorough in his discussion and does something that I wish a lot more tutorial writers would do when they’re introducing a new technology like this: he intentionally makes a few mistakes along the way. The kinds of mistakes that you or I would probably make too. Of course, he explains what’s going on and how to correct those mistakes, but Curt’s approach provides a lot more insight into the proper use of Rails than would the typical approach, where everything goes right the first time. By the end of the tutorial you have a reasonably functional “Cookbook” web application, backed by a MySQL database. Curt also promises a follow-up article to discuss adding additional functionality to the application.

Some of the discussion on ruby-talk indicates that the article may be a little out of date — not surprising, since the development on Rails has been going at fever pitch over the last few months. Nevertheless, this is a valuable resource for beginning Rails developers.

Apparently David Heinemeier Hansson will settle for nothing less than world domination. With the launch of Ta-da List, he’s sprung yet another Rails-based application on the world. I only just got around to looking at Flickr (also based on Rails, methinks) this past weekend and here comes a new toy to play with.

At first it wasn’t clear to me how (or if) Ta-da List is significantly different from 43 Things, a different Rails-based web site that I’ve written about earlier. Ta-da List is a subset of Basecamp, the project management system from 37signals, and it’s clear from the web site that a significant motivation behind providing Ta-da List as a free service is to advertise for the more powerful capabilities found in Basecamp.

After a little more investigation, however, it looks like Ta-da List is simply an application for maintaining lists of things. Not that that’s a bad thing: it’s just different from what I see in 43 Things, which is more of a platform for social networking. With Ta-da List, you can maintain more than one list (e.g. “Things to do today”, “Books to read”, “People to kill”) and a given list can be publicly shared (viewable by all), privately shared (viewable and editable only by invitation) or a combination of the two (anyone can see it; only you and designated others can edit it). There are of course some nice touches that you appreciate but don’t always expect, like per-list RSS feeds.

I have the feeling that I’ll come to really like this service for the same reason that I like del.icio.us. Putting the “social” aspect of del.icio.us aside, it finally gives me a way to access my bookmarks from any computer I’m sitting in front of; no more of this maintaining one set of bookmarks in Firefox at work, but a different set of bookmarks in Safari at home. In the same way, I think Ta-da List has the same potential to help me keep all of my little lists no further away than the nearest Internet connection, which would be swell since I never did get the PDA bug like so many of my friends and co-workers have.

Ruby Central, Inc. is an organization founded by David A. Black and Chad Fowler for the purpose of supporting Ruby activities (such as the annual International Ruby Conference).

Ruby Central has recently announced a grant program to support local or regional groups of Ruby programmers who wish to organize a “codefest” aimed at developing new, high-quality Ruby libraries. The goal is to fill identifiable gaps in Ruby library functionality, but we’re not looking for anything specific; part of the application process involves your explanation of why this functionality is needed. A total of $1500 will be awarded, with a maximum of $500 per group.

If you’d like to apply for one of these grants, get busy! The rules and guidelines are listed on the application form, and the deadline for submissions has been extended to January 30.

Just a quick congratulations to Coach Tommy Tuberville and the Auburn Tigers for defeating Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl last night (final score, 16-13).

In his characteristically subtle way, Why dropped a reference to a new web site called 43 Things. When I say “new”, I of course mean it’s new to me (as it appears that the domain name was registered back in April 2004).

43 Things is one of a number of social networking sites (like del.icio.us) that have been quietly popping up over the last few years. The idea with 43 Things is that you make a list of goals, things that you’d like to do, and then chart your progress towards those goals. At the same time, you’re sharing your goals with others and perhaps finding that you have goals in common with other users in the 43 Things community. Given the time of year, it seems like recording my New Year’s Resolutions might provide a good excuse for playing around with this site for awhile.

As an aside, it was interesting to note that on the 43 Things Zeitgeist, two of the top ten “World’s Most Popular Goals” are Ruby-related: Learn Ruby, currently at number 3, and Write an Application on Rails, currently at number 7.