About

Muddy is a service produced by Rattle, who specialise in research and development for the social web.

The initial concept came out of some research work on 'horizontal navigation' done as part of the BBC Innovation Labs project in 2007. This project investigated how data from Wikipedia could be used to improve the browsing experience on the BBC News website, and was christened "Muddy Boots" (to represent the muddy boots of external content trampling over BBC webpages).

The project produced interesting results, but highlighted that disambiguation of names was the key problem when trying to link different domains of information together.

To solve this, we used DBpedia as a controlled vocabulary - it provides canonical identifiers derived from Wikipedia URLs. DBpedia also allowed us to access useful additional information about the resource, from which we could contextually disambiguate the things identified in webpages we analysed.

This project was subsequently commissioned and tested by the BBC, who have gone on to use it within their in-house systems.

We have since further developed the product, and are launching it as a public commercial web service called simply "Muddy".