Ben Werdmuller and his colleague Marcus Povey of Curverider came out to Walnut Creek yesterday to talk about OpenDD (Open data definition.)

Its a schema and an approach to representing all the disparate kinds of data that a social network stores - so that this stuff can be successfully exchanged, synchronized and subscribed to between different social network and social media systems.

One of the battlefields that have been fought over the years - are schemas. These data structures are the lists of the exact fields and structures that make up a particular set of ‘information’. Of course - everybody thinks that THEIR schema is the best - and I’ve participated in these relatively academic debates.

But the coolio thing about what Ben and his folks at Curverider have done - is that OpenDD not only covers all the schema stuff and what’s needed to facilitate data inter-change but its also grounded in a pragmatic approach to updating and synchronizing disparate system’s data structs together which are often dynamic and which are thought of completely differently by each system.

This is crucial because as the battles of the behemoths continue, we need to find common ground for open standards.

Since one man’s Group is - is another man’s Network - we’d better have a way of synchronizing the two together.

And since what a playlist, album or collection are is different in each system - there had better be a way for me to move my playlists from Ning to hi5 or Bebo.

How one keeps track of lists of contacts, friends, etc., is different. So any traditional schema approach just ain’t gonna cut it. We need something that is designed to deal with dynamic data, that is changing as fast as you follow some other Twitter twit - or add a name to your FriendFeed.

So OpenDD is a solution for inter-change, streaming, subscribing to and getting feeds from and synchronization. This is what Atom is all about - so I’m hoping to see OpenDD wrapped inside of Atom.

And this is what the OpenID2 attribute exchange was designed to handle - so utilizing the OpenDD approach with OpenID2 should all go smoothly. Watch for first implementations in June.

Like any good open standard, OpenDD is based upon UUIDs (universal unique identifiers) so it should be able to work with anything and anybody.

Curverider - like Broadband Mechanics has a real need to inter-connect their various networks together (their platform is called Elgg - and it’s positioned to work with (what we call) “inside the Firewall solutions.” Our platform (PeopleAggregator) is positioned to consumer facing solutions.

But we both wish to inter-connect our networks together.

NOTE: Right now we’re just talking about dataportability. Interoperability will come next.

And needless to say - this is exactly what the DataPortability.org effort has been hoping for and is supporting. They’ll be a presentation on OpenDD at the upcoming Data Sharing Summit next week.

So congrats to Ben and Marcus and the team on a job well done. Ben and company are looking for feedback - so please join the list and let’s get this puppy rolling! I’ve already seen postings on the Ning API on the list and now I wonder if Ning will expose anything more than just profile info - in their CVS.

Here’s Ben in front of a piece of my mural on the open mesh. We added some key stuff to it - once we reviewed everything. State, Redundancy and Context.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 8:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.