Signposting Sniffing

Signposting (signposting.org) is a mechanism to help navigation of the scholarly web, where scholarly objects like datasets, publications and researchers are published on various web pages. The landing pages for these objects are usually designed for human readability, with links between them being (at best) described by a hyperlink's link text, or (at worst) relying on the reader's knowledge of where else to look up related information.

The goal of signposting is to let robot clients navigate to metadata associated with a typically human-readable landing page for a dataset. These robot clients might be web crawlers collating datasets about a topic, accessibility clients reworking a web pages information, or many other use cases.

Signposting is implemented as "typed links" between URLs, where the links can be implemented via various web technologies.

The goal of this browser extension is to make those robot-navigable links human-readable. This is useful for the developers of web pages who are adding or maintaining signposting links, as well as for users of the scholarly web who may discover that they can programatically access a resource they didn't previously know they could.