Details of data portability in the wild.
Microformats - data portability through (X)HTML
"Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).
"microformats are:
- a way of thinking about data
- design principles for formats
- adapted to current behaviors and usage patterns ("Pave the cow paths.")
- highly correlated with semantic XHTML, AKA the real world semantics, AKA lowercase semantic web, AKA lossless XHTML
- a set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general.
- "An evolutionary revolution"
- all the above.
"microformats are not:
- a new language
- infinitely extensible and open-ended
- an attempt to get everyone to change their behavior and rewrite their tools
- a whole new approach that throws away what already works today
- a panacea for all taxonomies, ontologies, and other such abstractions
- defining the whole world, or even just boiling the ocean
- any of the above
"the microformats principles* solve a specific problem
- start as simple as possible
- design for humans first, machines second
- reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
- modularity / embeddability
- enable and encourage decentralized development, content, services"
http://microformats.org/
DiSo - data portability through WordPress
"Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards - both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard apis, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides/legs/arms/spokes - pick your connection: Information, Identity, and Interaction.
DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts using the framework/platform of existing content management systems, or as Chris puts it: "to build a social network with its skin inside out"."
http://diso-project.org/wiki/Main_Page
SharedUniverse Project - data portability through Drupal
*"*Our Strategy is Pragmatic and Incremental. Start with a Free Software base for a Content-Management and Community Management System (Drupal).
- Implement identity aggregation tools to export and ensure free access to personal data currently stored in numerous service providers (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo!Mail, etc.) (see dataportability.org, and specifically, the GraphSyncproject)
- Integrate existing partially-free virtual world services (i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc.).
- Coordinate and integrate existing Free Software projects and their technologies to create a full stack of virtual world services built with Free Software. This will create Free alternatives to proprietary services where necessary and integration between them regardless.
- Host them all in a Free (community supported) online virtual world, SharedUniverse.net, as a reference installation."
http://shareduniverse.net/
data portability through W3C
"The Social Web, Data Portability, and the W3C
Dan Brickley, <danbri a! danbri.org>
Harry Halpin, <H.Halpin a! ed.ac.uk>
"Social Data Portability requires:
- The Authentication Story: How can you use a single login to securely access multiple services, both to download, modify, and upload social data? OpenID is the best story with an upswing in implementation
- The Social Graph Story: How do we actually get the social graph, merge social graphs from different services, and query graphs. RDF has the best story, with lots of tested software implementations
...
W3C - Seen as slow, semi-closed, and old-fashioned - surely not the place for hip Web 2.0 developers and entrepreneurs! And we all know standards by committee are a disaster... The W3C would be useful would to ratify, double-check, and flesh out corner-cases for existing standards that are created by a small and fast-moving group! An optimal solution would be for the DataPortability.org to create a working technical solution over the next year, and then the W3C to ratify it through a Working Group."
http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/homepage/presentations/socialnet/
http://esw.w3.org/topic/OpenSocialData
data portability through Jabber/XMPP
http://florianjensen.com/2008/02/11/jabber-and-data-portability/
http://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/social
Other thoughts
http://www.wikiservice.at/user/milk/wiki.cgi?BlogCMSWants
