AlchemyPoint Technology Preview - FAQ
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General:
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AlchemyPoint is an advanced new structured web / data mashup platform.
It understands structured data residing within web pages and uses this information to expose a whole world of related online content. It
provides advanced content manipulation and mashup capabilities that enable websites to be manipulated as easily as children's clay. Pages
can be visually remixed, content reformatted, etc. Users can share these manipulations with friends or coworkers, or publish them for
access by the entire world.
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Today's Internet is a web of documents; users are limited to navigating
between websites using search engines and hypertext links. Tomorrow's Internet will be a web of structured information:
· Our web browsers will understand the content of web pages -- detecting objects like books, news articles, etc. This understanding will be utilized to
discover relevant information such as book reviews, news commentary, and other useful information resources.
· Users will navigate between online information resources based on discovered context and meaning, rather than being limited to using search engines and hypertext links.
· Websites will no longer be static one-way information resources, but rather will offer endless user customization and content manipulation capabilities.
AlchemyPoint brings the power of the structured web to Internet users today, by discovering the hidden meaning inside web pages, enabling
contextual navigation between websites, and by enabling Internet content to be visually customized and reformatted.
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Technical Answer:
A mashup is a manipulation of Internet content, usually a combination of information from two or more online information sources.
"Uhm.. Huh?" Answer:
You can think of a mashup as being like a collage or quilt, but made from different websites. Combine any content you want -- Google+Yahoo,
Flickr+Photobucket, CNN+MSNBC, the possibilities are endless. Create composite webpages from any number of information sources: How about a
single page showing all your friends' latest Myspace profile updates? 10-day weather forecast in your home page? With mashups, it's entirely
up to you.
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AlchemyPoint Suggestions will expose you to interesting Internet content
related to what you're doing online, by detecting objects like movies,
books, and news articles in web pages.
Example: You're looking at a book online. AlchemyPoint is capable of
suggesting all sorts of information: other books by this author, online
retailers with the lowest prices for this book, reviews of this book, etc.
Suggestions are provided for all sorts of information (not just books!),
and you can even teach AlchemyPoint about things it doesn't yet
understand (medical journals, patents, anything you want!).
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AlchemyPoint's mashup capability enables you to have complete control
over the look and feel of websites you interact with online. Web pages can be endlessly customized using hundreds of available manipulations.
What kind of manipulations? Things like translating text, deleting or reformatting web page content, inserting related information (images,
wikipedia entries, news, etc.), embedding widgets or clipped web content, and so on.
Manipulations can be tied to any number of conditions. Want to ignore
CNN's Entertainment News on Saturdays? Highlight Microsoft news articles when their stock is down? No problem!
AlchemyPoint offers hundreds of predefined web manipulations and conditions, which users can recombine to create literally
billions of useful new mashups.
Can't find the manipulation or condition you're looking for? Create it yourself, taking advantage of AlchemyPoint's incredible developers platform. We make it easy with Tutorials & Howtos,
a Developer Wiki, and other great community resources.
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6. I'm a Developer. How can AlchemyPoint benefit me?
AlchemyPoint is the ideal platform for developing Internet/Intranet
mashups, providing a unique combination of mashup and SOA technology.
Only the AlchemyPoint platform offers an integrated application server,
data scraping/transformation capability, and web services stack.
These capabilities are combined with unique proxy mashup technology that
enables new functionality to be easily and transparently embedded into
existing websites or Intranet portals.
AlchemyPoint offers features found in high-end enterprise application
integration platforms: CORBA, SOAP, WS-* web services, and more.
For more information on the AlchemyPoint platform, please visit the
Developers section of our website.
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AlchemyPoint was created by Orchestr8, a technology startup located in Denver, Colorado.
We've been operating in stealth mode since mid-2005, engineering the AlchemyPoint platform and building its underlying technology.
Our founder is Elliot Turner, a software entrepreneur with expertise in
high speed network protocol decoding, information security, and content
analysis. Prior to forming Orchestr8, Elliot founded an enterprise
network intrusion detection company that was subsequently acquired by a
publicly-traded network security vendor in 2000. Elliot has been a
contributor or co-author of several books on Linux and security topics.
Our team consists of a diverse group of individuals whose areas of
experience include mission-critical systems design and high-speed
document analysis. Many of us regularly compete in programming and
mathematics competitions to refine our skills.
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Features:
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AlchemyPoint Suggestions are an exciting new way to explore related content on the web.
AlchemyPoint Suggestions will expose you to interesting Internet content
related to what you're doing online, by detecting objects like movies,
books, and news articles in web pages.
Example: You're looking at a book online. AlchemyPoint is capable of
suggesting all sorts of information: other books by this author, online
retailers with the lowest prices for this book, reviews of this book, etc.
Suggestions are provided for all sorts of information (not just books!),
and you can even teach AlchemyPoint about things it doesn't yet
understand (medical journals, patents, anything you want!).
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Suggestions take advantage of AlchemyPoint's advanced structured
content scraping and data mashup capabilities, to detect structured
data in web pages such as movies, books, and news articles. This
information is utilized to discover and suggest other relevant
information resources and bits of information (movie reviews, news
commentary, etc.).
Some facts regarding suggestions:
· AlchemyPoint Suggestions are not hard-coded in any way, but rather are
user-created mashups. You can add new suggestions to the system, delete
ones you don't like, etc.
· Suggestions are visually created directly from our browser-based
toolbar interface, without any need for programming or editing
configuration files.
· AlchemyPoint users can teach the system about new websites and types
of structured data (things other than books, movies, etc.). This
teaching process requires no programming or editing of configuration
files, but rather relies on a visual learn-by-example mechanism.
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Yes, you can. In fact, every single suggestion you see in AlchemyPoint
was created right from the browser-based toolbar interface.
After some familiarization with the AlchemyPoint interface, most technically-capable users can construct a new suggestion in under a
minute. Experienced users can do it even faster.
Once created, mashups and suggestions can be published for widespread use or shared with friends and coworkers. Sharing/publishing occurs
right from the browser-based interface, no external tools required.
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Web pages can be mashed up directly from the browser, using our graphical toolbar interface.
Creating your own mashup is easy, just do the following:
· Click "Customize this Page!"
· Select the desired page manipulation with your mouse, or using
text-based command entry.
· That's it!
Mashups can be created in just a few seconds!
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AlchemyPoint includes all sorts of predefined manipulations:
language
translation, text reformatting, image manipulation, content
clipping/deletion, related content retrieval, etc.
Manipulations can be tied to any number of conditions: timers,
triggers based on time-of-day, or day-of-week, etc. You can even create
conditions that utilize dynamically-retrieved Internet content: check
stock prices, market conditions, traffic conditions, even the weather!
AlchemyPoint offers hundreds of predefined web manipulations and
conditions, which users can recombine to create literally
billions of useful new mashups.
Can't find the manipulation or condition you're looking for? Create it
yourself, taking advantage of AlchemyPoint's incredible developers platform. We make it easy with Tutorials & Howtos,
a Developer Wiki, and other great community resources.
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Mashups and suggestions can be published for widespread use or shared
with friends and coworkers. Sharing/publishing occurs right from the
browser-based interface, no external tools required.
Note: Sharing/publishing functionality is not available in the current
AlchemyPoint Technology Preview. We'll be enabling this functionality in a subsequent version update.
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Technology:
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AlchemyPoint utilizes proprietary proxy mashup technology that enables new
functionality to be transparently overlaid onto existing websites,
Intranet portals, or enterprise services.
Heuristic-based "structured content" scraping technology allows for
structured data to be extracted from websites and other data sources
without knowledge of underlying data formats or other technical details.
Using this technology, users may visually select the desired web
content via a computer mouse, or textually describe the desired content
via a natural-language-style query language.
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The Firefox browser extension is just a front-end interface to the AlchemyPoint system.
AlchemyPoint's real power lies in the backend service that powers this
extension. Operating locally on your desktop PC, this service is
responsible for structured content detection, web manipulation/mashup
execution, and suggestions generation.
The AlchemyPoint Service contains a powerful web application server /
proxy service that can be utilized to construct mashups, web
applications, and content transformation/processing tools. It offers
advanced data scraping/transformation capability, a complete web
services stack, multi-language scripting, database access, and other
advanced capabilities.
For more information on the AlchemyPoint platform and its utility as a
development platform, please visit the Developers section of our website.
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AlchemyPoint contains a custom-engineered RSS / ATOM engine that offers
a wide range of capabilities to both end-users and Internet developers.
Users can take advantage of AlchemyPoint's capability to detect feeds
associated with web pages, parse & manipulate those feeds, even
construct new feeds.
Developers can utilize our comprehensive Syndication Engine to build any
sort of RSS / ATOM application, whether it be a feed crawl, aggregator,
etc. The AlchemyPoint Syndication Engine supports all major RSS / ATOM
standards ( ATOM 1.0, 0.3 -- RSS 2.0, 1.0, 0.94, 0.93, 0.92, 0.91n,
0.91, 0.90 -- OPML 1.0, 1.1 ), extensions (Doublin Core, Syndication,
RSS Admin, Feedburner, Livejournal, MSN Spaces, Open Search, MediaRSS,
iTunes, GeoGML, GeoRSS, CreativeCommons, FAC, TrackBack, WFW, Slash,
Simple List Extension, Google Picasa, Google GData), and offers advanced
crawler / persistence capabilities.
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You sure can!
For more information on the AlchemyPoint platform and its utility as a
development platform, please visit the Developers section of our website.
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Tech Preview:
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AlchemyPoint is currently supported Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS-X (10.4+ [Tiger / Leopard]). Our browser front-end works in both Firefox and Flock.
Note: AlchemyPoint for Linux is currently undergoing in-house testing.
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This Technology Preview contains a number of important limitations:
· This is not a general software release, but rather a demonstration
of our AlchemyPoint technology. It is meant to serve as a first look
at AlchemyPoint, and does not represent the look and feel of the final
product. This is pre-beta software, but we're looking for your feedback to help us improve the product!
· The current Preview release may contain a number of software bugs that
limit operation on certain websites. We will be releasing regular
updates that resolve these issues as they are discovered.
· AlchemyPoint currently does not have complete international character
support. In particular, it does not handle many non-western character
sets very well. This will be improved in future releases.
· Sharing/Publishing functionality is currently disabled in the current
Technology Preview. It will be enabled in a future release.
· The current version does not provide adequate debugging and logging
tools for developers constructing new AlchemyPoint manipulation or
condition primitives, or utilizing the AlchemyPoint platform for
solutions development. In the near future we will be providing
additional tools and enabling access to our platform Tutorials & Howtos,
and Developer Wiki.
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Yes, there are potentially some bugs. This is a Technology Preview
release, and should not be utilized on mission-critical systems, or for
commercial solutions development.
However, we've been utilizing AlchemyPoint in-house for well over a
year, and consider it quite robust. If you discover an issue, please
report it to us, and we'll fix it!
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Thanks for learning about the AlchemyPoint structured web and data mashup platform.
Sign up for our Technology Preview today!
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