What is the Piggy Bank Semantic Web browser extension for Firefox?

Released by the SIMILE Project , Piggy Bank is the Semantic Web browser extension.

The Semantic Web initiative has defined a standard data model called Resource Description Framework, useful for organizing content on the Web independent of formatting. Data represented in RDF is easier to reuse than information contained in standard HTML pages.

Piggy Bank is used to extract information from existing Web pages and then store it using RDF. If a Web page already has links to RDF information, Piggy Bank simply retrieves that information; otherwise, it employs custom software to extract the RDF data from the page.

For a copy of Piggy Bank, go to the Piggy Bank site  using Firefox and click the 'Get Piggy Bank' button. Add the download site to the list of sites allowed to install software in Firefox, accept the prompt to install the unsigned download and restart the browser.

When Firefox restarts, follow the prompts to set up your Piggy Bank. From there, you can browse the Simile site using Piggy Bank to familiarize yourself with the system. Piggy Bank works well to collect RDF content from other sites and stores it locally for reuse.

Gathering RDF data from older Web sites requires screen scrapers to filter the data. Some examples are provided, as are screen-scraper development guidelines.