Daniel’s Blog

DataPortability - The Pros

If you were not aware there is a movement going on at the moment called the DataPortability initiative. This initiative has been set up to try to:

• show users of web systems (in particular Social Networking systems) that they currently don’t have full control over the information that they put onto systems
• assist developers and business people that the best way forward to to make Data portable, as in you can move your information from one system to another by sharing (one of the slogans was “sharing is caring”).

I think that this is a very good cause because

• Its a step in the right direction for the next web (which might be called Web 3.0 or the Data Web)
• It is more ethical as it gives the user the ability to control who has what information

From a technological point of view it does seem to be going in a good direction with technologies such as:

• OpenID for Identification
• OAuth for Authentication
• FOAF for sharing profile and friendship information (plus this is a Semantic Web based vocabulary)
• SIOC for linking blog posts, wiki articles and such like together into a community (this is also a Semantic Web vocabulary)
• RSS and OPML for News Feeds (aka Syndication)
• Microformats (this is a Semantic Web based technology for embedding meaningful data into (X)HTML web pages)
• APML for sharing information about a users interests (also known as an Attention Profile)

DataPortability - The downsides

There are two downside which I can see at the moment in regards to the DataPortability initiative, and they are:

• It hasn’t concentrated on linking common data together to make a meaningful graph. This is what people are trying to do on the “Linked Data” project. This would come about with the use of things like SKOS, SCOT and MOAT.
• It has concentrated on Input/Output. With DataPortability a user has more control over their data, but its still a “copy/paste” problem, which uses up more memory and what if one side is edited and the other is not. It is a silo problem, data is more important for the user than for companies. Real Data Portability should be based on references like an Object Identifier (OID) is a unique key to an object, this can be done on the web using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).

Summary

The DataPortability Initiative is a good one, I do see it as a stepping stone to the next web (or an evolutionary step towards a better being) and it has some very cool technologies that it tries to promote. However there are downsides, which can (and should) be fixed using Semantic Web technologies.

OpenLink Software supports DataPortability Standards and Semantic Web Standards, and I am on the DataPortability Evangelism Group and in the Semantic Web Community. With OpenLink Data Spaces the user is in full control of their data, its theirs, no silo, they give permissions about who/what can access it and it is their own Personal Space.

A new slogan for DataPorability + the Semantic Web

Providing meaning is caring, therefore: Connect, Control, Share, Link.

Document Web Links (for Humans):

• DataPortability.org
• Semantic Web at the W3C

Technorati Tags: dataportability, semanticweb, webstandards, pros, cons