Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

AdaptiveBlue, maker of smart browsing technology that leverages personalization and semantics, unveiled on Tuesday the next release of its BlueOrganizer browser add-on for Firefox and Flock. Dubbed Indigo, the new features revolve around the theme of recognizing information in pages, text, and links, enabling a smart contextual browsing experience that gives consumers personalized shortcuts for interacting with the web of things.

“The technology takes a lightweight, top-down approach to surfacing objects across consumer verticals that matter,” says Fraser Kelton, AdaptiveBlue’s director of business development. “When semantics gives you the meaning of an object, you can put in front of individuals all the actions they can interact with — the noun-verb equation. Once you understand the noun across pages, text, or links, you can give targeted and textually correct actions that go along with it.”

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Among the new features in this release of BlueOrganizer are the addition of context-sensitive icons in the browser toolbar that change to match the object in the page — a book icon, for example, appears when users search Amazon’s books; personalized shortcuts based on your browsing history (for example, an option to find the same book you are looking at on Amazon at BarnesandNoble.com, to rent a movie you’re reading a review of from Netflix, or send an instant message to Twitter); and the use of natural language search technology to peruse vertical categories of saved “My Things” (books, movies, etc., with their relevant details) for books or movies on a particular subject, particular fields within a book (such as author or the director), the year they were written or released, and so on.

Also included in the new version is the use of microformats combined with homegrown recognition algorithms to get smart menus about text that resides within a web page — for example, click on an author’s name when checking out reviews of his book, and one option presented to you might be to go to the Wikipedia page that hosts her bio. Indigo illustrates “how semantic technology enables a very simple consumer interface to navigate through a large data set this is specifically searching for attributes, but also is very smart about the attributes in pages,” says CEO Alex Iskold. “Up until now you were talking about interacting with things on the page as a whole. Now you can go inside the pages.”

If someone uses the hCard microformat, BlueOrganizer Indigo will recognize that text as a person and pop up an appropriate smart menu, giving you options to email or visit that person’s web page. Because hCards aren’t ubiquitously used yet, however, the service also recognizes 500 common first names, and can provide similarly appropriate options when you highlight a name within any web page.

The company also has integrated SmartLinks, previously a publisher technology for web site operators and bloggers to turn an ordinary link into a semantic link, right into the browser, to recognize entities within links and get contextual shortcuts related to them. “So, basically, the three different aspects of semantics are overlaid on top of the three most basic elements: a web page, a piece of text and the link,” says Iskold.

The stirrings of how AdaptiveBlue will build a social layer atop this are apparent in this release, too. For example, you could see from a Smart Link that a book is the 28th most clicked of all book Smart Links across the web.

“Now who are the people clicking on this book,” says Iskold. That’s where the “social bits are coming. This release lays out the foundations. It basically puts all the semantic sticks in the ground for pages, links and text, and then the social layer has to be overlaid on top of that.”

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