Weblogs: Semantic Web

The Mozilla Application Platform

Thursday, October 17, 2002

Noticing yet another excellent Slashdot book review "Creating Applications with Mozilla" exposing how Mozilla is more than just a browser but a foundation for applications ranging from stand-alone to distributed applications running across the Internet. I'm tempted with trying out a few of my Intelligent Agent ideas on this platform to see how things could work. Being a world-class piece of software, I'd expect an XML parser to be there, and with any luck an XSL engine.

One of the problems about defining knowledge is that reusing it over and over will bore the visitor to death. If George Bush is in the news every day (just ask him to name the current leader of Pakistan should be sufficient - at least he can spell "potatos") and my knowledge base knows of a good reference to a biography of George Bush Jnr, then it will keep linking that up till the cows come home (and demand their milk back). I couldn't think of anything more infuriating (except for a neverending stream of onUnload popup a new window windows). So there needs to be some freshness to it.

An idea struck me this morning of using RSS feeds to freshen up the suggested links. I know which blogs I read every day, I know which subjects I am interested in. Now if I'm reading a story on the web about something I'm interested in, wouldn't it be cool for it to be dynamically linked to a few blogs covering the same topic - blogs written by people that I think write decent material.

Quite a lot of RSS aggregators are stand alone programs, and it seems to me that this is a natural killer app for a Web-enabled application platform.


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