SOA.WRK.

Data Portability: not a technical, but a political group?

It is never clear to me what does the Data Portability project do. I have visited their web site and read their wiki pages several times since late last year, but was never able to find anything concrete there. However, big name companies are joining the project one after another, e.g., Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, and Microsoft

A blog by Eran Hammer-Lahav, The Big Pink Elephant of DataPortability, finally provides me with a good picture of what is going on here. The Data Portability project is just a user group for users of open standards like: OpenID, OAuth, RSS, and Microformats. The problem here is that Data Portability is trying to position itself in order to influence the future design of open standards. However, these open standard communities do not want to be influenced nor controlled by yet another group. Eran stated in the blog:

"... members of the OAuth, OpenID, and Microformats communities tried to convince the primary leaders of the DataPortability group to focus only on marketing and public relations. Everything else must be out of scope, ..."

So, the Data Portability project does not own anything but is trying to govern open standards developed by other communities. That explains why I was never able to find any technical information on its site. However, the Data Portability problem may be a political not technical one.

Posted at 10:59PM May 22, 2008 by tientienli in Personal  |