Alex Iskold
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

When we started AdaptiveBlue, we created a browser extension called BlueOrganizer, that automatically recognized content in pages and offered the user a better, more meaningful experience. Next, we aimed to take this experience and apply it to whole web.

What does it mean to make the web smarter? Our answer is to add the smarts to the atom of the web — the link.

Until now, we all thought of links as pointers to pages. There was a paradox when we blogged about a book or a movie, we meant the thing but pointed to a page. With SmartLinks, the paradox disappears, because unlike the regular links, which point to pages, SmartLinks really point to things.

Think about each book link as the link to a book.

Instead of the link being the point of research, it becomes the destination. SmartLinks pulls in the best information from around the web, right into the users context. Instead of interacting with the pointer to a book, with SmartLink, the user is interacting with the actual book.

With SmartLinks, the web of pages goes away and the web of things is starting to emerge.

The micro web of things is created automatically for the entire blog or a web site as soon as the content owner drops in a single line of JavaScript. Each link to a book, movie, music, stock, restaurant, wine, etc. becomes a SmartLink. No matter when was the link created, the SmartLink is added to it. Covering historical web is very important, as any solution that adds smarts to the web should work with not just new content, but with existing one as well.

Consider now our approach on the web wide scale:

1. The smarts are added to links — the atoms of the web, making the links point to things instead of pages.

2. It is top-down solution, no annotation needs to be done to the content, it just works.

3. It focuses on everyday things: books, music, movies, stocks, etc. Adding support for new kinds of things is straightforward.

This approach is simple, yet powerful. And it works today.

This article first appeared on BlueBlog, AdaptiveBlue’s blog.