Piggy Bank is a Firefox extension that turns your browser into a mashup platform, by allowing you to extract data from different web sites and mix them together. Piggy Bank also allows you to store this extracted information locally for you to search later and to exchange at need the collected information with others. Download Piggy Bank Installation Instructions Available Screen Scrapers How to Write a Screen Scraper What's New Screencasts

Contributing

Piggy Bank is an open source software and built around the spirit of open participation and collaboration. There are several ways you can help:

• Blog about Piggy Bank
• Subscribe to our mailing lists to show your interest and give us feedback
• Report problems and ask for new features through our issue tracking system (but take a look at our todo list first)
• Send us patches or fixes to the code
• Publish Semantic Web data on your web site (how-to) for Piggy Bank’s consumption
• Write and submit new screen scrapers for others to use

Research

Publications on Piggy Bank:

• David Huynh, Stefano Mazzocchi, and David Karger. Piggy Bank: Experience the Semantic Web Inside Your Web Browser. International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2005.

Related research:

• Haystack project
• User Interface Design Group
• DIG Decentralized Information Group
• The mSpace project at Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.

History

Licensing & Legal Issues

Piggy Bank is open source software and is licensed under the BSD license.

Note, however, that this software ships with libraries that are not released under the same license; that we interpret their licensing terms to be compatible with ours and that we are redistributing them unmodified. For more information on the licensing terms of the libraries Piggy Bank depends on, please refer to the source code.

Piggy Bank makes use of Google Maps and Google’s geo-coordinate look-up service but no Google’s copyrighted information is distributed along or contained within Piggy Bank. We are deeply grateful to Google for making such a great service available and for allowing others to use it as specified in their terms of use.

Disclaimer

Piggy Bank can make use of screen scrapers to extract information from certain web pages. Since users have the ability to install additional scrapers in Piggy Bank, it is conceivable that some of those screen scrapers could potentially be hostile.

Although Piggy Bank is engineered to run scrapers in a sandbox, much alike the one that the browser uses to run javascript code embedded in web pages, and has been tested with a series of artificially hostile scrapers that we have developed to try to escape the sandbox, it is good practice to install scrapers only from sites that you know and trust, or inspect the scraper code before you run it.

Anyhow, while we have spent a great deal of effort to protect your browser and your data, please understand that the Simile team does not hold any responsibility over damages to your computer or your data caused by screen scrapers not written by the Simile team.

Credits

This software is maintained by the SIMILE project and in particular:

• David Huynh (original author)
• Stefano Mazzocchi
• Ryan Lee

The authors would like to thank the User Interface Design group, the Haystack group and the DIG Decentralized Information group at MIT CSAIL for their support and invaluable feedback.

This product includes software developed by the Apache Software Foundation.