Intel Mash Maker

Abstract

Intel® Mash Maker is an interactive tool that tracks what the user is doing and tries to infer what information and visualizations they might find useful for their current task. Mash Maker uses structured data from existing web sites to create new "mashed up" interfaces combining information from many sources. The Intel® Mash Maker client is currently implemented as an extension to the FireFox web browser. Mash Maker adds a toolbar to the browser that shows buttons representing enhancements that Mash Maker believes the user might want to apply to the current page. An enhancement might combine the data on the page with data from another source, or visualize data in a new way. Mash Maker is intended to be an integral part of the way the user browses information, rather than being a special tool that a user uses when they want to create mashups. In order to create mashups from normal websites, Mash Maker must first extract structured data from them. If the web site does not provide RDF data, then Mash Maker extracts structured data from the raw HTML using a community-maintained database of extractors , where each extractor describes how to extract structured data from a particular kind of web site.