ContextMiner.com - Accessing YouTube Contextual Info

Developed by a research group hailing from the University of Carolina, ContextMiner is self-described as a framework for the collection and analysis of data along with contextual information. This way, the true ramifications that every file which is hosted online has can be fully understood and processed.

For example, if you use ContextMiner with any YouTube video it will extract the embed link alongside information such as the sites and blogs linking to the video itself. Note that the video per se is not extracted; all that is extracted is the aforementioned information. The idea is not just making sense of the object by placing it in a more comprehensive light, but also providing the means for preserving it better.

To use ContextMiner, all you have to do is sign up for a free account and choose your intended destination. Examples are thankfully provided, but the whole system is quite intuitive and easy to get to grips with. So far, only YouTube and blogs are supported. Hopefully, a new major update will be forthcoming, and add support for other cardinal websites such as MetaCafe and Google Videos.

“ContextMiner is a framework to collect, analyze, and present the contextual information along with the data. It is based on an idea that while describing or archiving an object, contextual information helps to make sense of that object or to preserve it better. This website provides tools to collect data, metadata, and contextual information off the Web by automated crawls.”

It is an interesting tool that makes for quickly realizing the interconnection between different web contents.

When is the next major update being released?