Muddy

What is it?

It’s a tool you can use to index and categorise content. Muddy then enables you to pull back other relevant meta data and content from the web or your own domain. Muddy is currently in trial with the BBC and is planned to launch as a Rattle product in early 2009.

What is the need?

The process of indexing and categorising content well can be onerous, especially if you have a lot of content – categorising, indexing and providing relevant metadata and links to a document can be done manually but this falls out of date and is expensive. There are a range of products on the market which dynamically do this for you but Muddy is one which does this using “the commons”, that is using the inherent value of Wikipedia to enrich your content.

Who is it for?

People or organisations with lots of content. The BBC have sponsored a lot of the development of Muddy to date and have integrated aspects of the service into their meta systems.

What is the benefit?

If you have a lot of content this can help to provide useful dynamic categories, links to relevant documents, markup of entities in the document (people, organisations, subjects, places). This helps to provide business value in the form of better ways into and out of a document or webpage and dynamic aggregation of content around an entity or concept; it has the ability to make your content more relevant to the user.

Can I use it?

You can see a demonstration of what Muddy does via the product site where you can also trial the service.