The DataPortability workgroup, which supports the portability of user identities, photos, videos and other forms of personal data, has garnered widespread attention in recent months. Major Internet companies, such as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Facebook , and even Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), have joined this initiative. But to achieve the eventual goal, it will be necessary to implement consistent ways to present this data and manage its ownership, beyond portability.
In Web 2.0, we often leave personal data behind after we join various Website services. Typically, this data includes personal registration information, such as the names, addresses, and emails, and individual user-generated content -- social tags, comments, and short instant messages. Until now, this data is scattered over the Web, and there is no generic mechanism to manage it.
Any eventual solution to data portability among trusted online tools and vendors must contain two key components -- a uniform presentation of portable data and an authority switch mechanism to manage ownership of that data. This authority switch mechanism is related to delicate security topics and content management issues. I have suggested a solution called Automatic Character Switch (ACtS). But many details are still under study.
The wide variety of data presentation is a main obstacle to exporting data from one Website to another. In order to make data portability on the Web efficient, we must have a standard way of presenting various data so that we can produce uniform interfaces for data transportation across different site boundaries.
Additionally, when we export data from one site to another, the ownership of the data must be transported simultaneously. Users should be allowed to continuously claim ownership of their data, no matter where it has been exported. At the same time, the destination sites sharing ownership of the data should be allowed to permit users to give up their ownership to the public domain or designated members.
Solving this data portability issue with standards and ownership management is a crucial step towards the post-Web 2.0 era. The successful final solution will have an impact on the Web in the following ways:
(1)The Web will gradually become a collective network of user-managed mini-Webs, or “internal, self-managed Webs" that focus on the interest of the individuals, compared to the current Web of community-run platforms. When Web data is freely portable over the Web, users will have much more flexibility to reorganize the data of interest into their own perspectives.
This trend will become a phenomenon in the next-generation Web; and blogs will be replaced by the invention of this technology -- just as blogs have replaced the role of home pages.
(2)The dominating interpretation of Web data will be switched from the writer-oriented view to the reader-oriented view. Users may be more interested in what the majority of data consumers think about a particular piece of data, rather than what the original producer thinks of that data.
When Web data becomes portable, we may automatically gather various user-generated views about the common data. As a result, developers can produce more user-friendly applications on Web data. Moreover, varied views of the same data will turn out to be a true initiative of the Semantic Web.
(3)Web searching will experience a revolutionary upgrade because of data portability. An immediate challenge to Web search is to figure out new ways of ranking Web data, especially when many identical copies come from various sites. Normally, it wouldn’t be critical to identify the origin of the source in such search results.
By contrast, various meanings of similar portable data deployed by different users might be more relative to the goal of Web search. Web search filtered by heterogeneous views will gradually replace the current Web search strategy that is dominated by homogeneous keyword matching. This transformation may lead to significant change of the current Web search infrastructure.
The progress of data portability will eventually change the Web in more significant ways than many of us could imagine. This is a field that academic researchers or technology entrepreneurs must pay more attention to. Once leading companies are committed to implementing widespread data portability, the eventual solution of this issue might signal the coming of Web 3.0.
— Yihong Ding, Semantic Web researcher and blogger
There may be various ways to present portable data, and indeed people are working on the stardards now. At this moment, I cannot precisely tell you that which one is the best and would be adopted in the future. But I can try to explain a little bit on how portable data might be like.
In order to present portable data, we may need to first encapsulate the data. The "tagging" mechanism you have mentioned is a way to encapsulate. By encapsulating the data, the individual portable data pieces may become things such as the portable Web widgets you have seen right now. One different thing is that these portable data pieces are also associated with explicit ownership declarations, i.e., the explicit specification of who own these data. When all these stardards could have been finalized, the portable data themselves can be stored at anywhere on the Web with their explicit ownership specifications (either owned by specified private members or by the public domain). The owner of a portable data piece can have privilege to manipulate the data besides reading.
In such a web of portable data, automated services can help automatically import and export data between varied sites and the owners can have a single uniform interface on controlling their owned portable data no matter how many times and how many places these data have been exported.
Hi, I think the idea of having portable info is interesting, but I am sill having a little trouble understanding how it would work. Would your info be "tagged" the same way information would be on the semantic web? Would your information be stored somewhere permanently outside of your computer? Would the site you are trying to input information to be able to identify your info on its own or would you have to tell it to do so? Thank you,
1. What does it mean to the individual to have an "internal self
managed web" around their interests. Does it mean content+services and
what is the responsibility of the individual and how is the individual
secure.
You have mentioned all the critical issues in this predicted future product. After the Web truly becomes a Web of portable data, users can store the references of their data of interest in their own home-spaces (compared to homepages). At the same time, these portable data represent respective Web nodes. So eventually, the content in each home-space becomes a network of individually selected Web nodes; this is the mini-Web or "internal self
managed web" I mentioned in the post.
The management of these mini-Webs are not trivial at all. We need to consider many issues such as the ones you have pointed out. The entire challenge is close to the original challenge of operating systems. But I would rather not call this management mechanism something as the "Web operating system" because it is fundamentally different from operating systems in single machines. By contrast, I would like to call it the Web resource management system, which is closer to the real purpose.
2. Does the notion of "reader-oriented view" restrict the individual
to a tunnel vision of the world? On the positive side, would the
individual have enough data to research a best selling book!
Ideally, every user may have his own "reader-oriented view". When he explore the Web, this view guides the organizing of the information he has explored. And this view is the core to organize the self-interested information in his own mini-Web.
We need some tools to help users abstract their interest and help them build up their "reader-oriented view". In my Web evolution series, I call this process of abstraction the education process on the Web. Note that in this process, our educational objects are not humans but machines. Humans need education to be knowledgeable; and so do machines. I doubt the top-down approach of designing intelligent agents by few experts in very few companies. This approach is not scalable to the variety of human interest. By contrast, the bottom-up approach that allows individuals to build up their own "mini-Web" that consist of their own "reader-oriented view" may be much more practical in reality.
So, would individuals have enough data to research a best selling book? It depends on how well the individuals have "educated" their machines. Just like in our human world, if you ask whether you can ask someone to help you research a best selling book, it depends on how well this being asked person has been educated and trained in this particular job.
3.
Will data portability open up search options or will it create a very
large monopoly. What are your thoughts on open-id, data portability and
monopolies
This progress of data portability is opposite to any super-size monopoly, I think. As I have emphasized many times, one inevitable consequence of this progress is the emergence of mini-Webs. The importance of individuals is increasing and the importance of monopolies (in our current sense) is decreasing.
But some new types of monopolies may emerge. By contrast to the current ones that dominating physical resources (such as data or services), the new type of monopolies will aim to dominate human resources on the Web, i.e., the rights of taking benefits from the individual mini-Webs. For instance, once you have trained your mini-Web for our interest, the monopoly will contact you and ask the exclusive rights of hiring your mini-Web into his region. Certainly the monopoly will pay you when hiring your mini-Web (just like you have been hired by a real-world company), but at the same time, it declares the exclusive ownership of your human knowledge. By this mean, the current Google or Facebook (if they do no upgrade accordingly) will be swapped out of our sight by these new powers. Internet evolution is a crude process.
OpenID is another important initiative that is mutual complement to the data portability initiative.
4. What are the likely challenges in distinguishing truth and lies in these situations
There are many challenges. As I said before, one of the greatest challenge is probably the research on Web resource management mechanism. Data portability is a critical component within this general plot. But the whole thing is much more complicated than just data portability. I expect that this research will be as critical as the original operating system research at the beginning of the PC era. As the result, some new companies that is similar to Microsoft may emerge that dominates this technology as Microsoft has dominated the operating system for personal computers.
We still need a few years to watch real breakthrough in this direction. But the study on data portability has really rang the bell in contrast to the original discussion of Web operating systems that is nearly nonsense with respect to real-world applications.
Looking at it from the individual's perspective , some questions come to mind ..
1. What does it mean to the individual to have an "internal self managed web" around their interests. Does it mean content+services and what is the responsibility of the individual and how is the individual secure.
2. Does the notion of "reader-oriented view" restrict the individual to a tunnel vision of the world? On the positive side, would the individual have enough data to research a best selling book!
3. Will data portability open up search options or will it create a very large monopoly. What are your thoughts on open-id, data portability and monopolies
4. What are the likely challenges in distinguishing truth and lies in these situations
Your skepticism about the big Internet names that are jumping on data portability bandwagon rings loud and clear. Are rival companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft really interested in developing a standard in sharing the personal data of their customers? The companies’ support clearly has social media enthusiasts happy, but many questions still remain about their sincerity.
In our editorial meeting on Monday, Steve Saunders asked me the same question: Why would these companies support an initiative that goes against the core of their business models? I intend to find the answer in a future Thinkernet article.
In a way, a data portability litmus test actually occurred earlier this year when popular blogger Robert Scoble was given an alpha version of Plaxo’s Facebook contact data importer, and the Facebook engine shut him down (see Techmeme for the full debate). So much for true interoperability.
As usual, I like your comments and appreaciate your helpful links.
I think you have caught a significant phenomenon at this moment. The big companies are sensitive (they have many smart guys). It explains why so quickly these big companies decided to join this workgroup. But on the other hand, everybody wants to dominate this fields; and thus nobody may succeed in foreseeable future.
There is a fundamental issue inside data portability. That is, we must break the barrier of Web sites so that all data become public resources. However, few Web companies are willing to make this movement because they take "their data" as their property and don't want to share with others, especially the other competitors. When this DataPortability workgroup is composed by these companies, we cannot expect rapid progress. So both the articles you have suggested really have pointed out a significant problem in the achievement.
On the other hand, however, the breakthrough on data portability will be an inevitable future. Why? Because this is the demand from regular users. We need new startups that focuses in this issue and start to design new generation home-spaces (my term) that will replace blog just as blogs have replaced homepages. This achievement will be a revolutionary moving forward. And this invention will be the signal of Web 3.0. I have already predicted it in my web evolution theory. The current achievement on data portability is demonstrating my prediction.
One question, who will succeed in this new startup? The one that succeeds will be the next Facebook.
Thanks for your post. As users, we can only hope that both Dataportability.org and OpenID foundation are both successful. Whilst we laud their initiative, one has to be skeptical about the big nams that have join them. How much deliberations is needed in other to come up with some acceptable standards??? Is not this another PR initiative by these big guns to buy time out so as to avoid meeting the user's desperate need for "openess"? I don't see this workgroup achieving any meaningful result in the forseable future rather than endless debates.
I am not sure whether the progress on data portability will help substantially on curbing cyber crime. But when the ownership of web resources become more transparent and clearly declared, it may increase the difficulty of some cyber crime.
For the second question, I think Web user will obtain more control of their information in future when the issue of data portability might be solved. This trend is very important to the future of the Web since we people always look for greater freedom of managing our information on the Web.
Yes, there have been several proposal for formatting data on the Web. I expect that many negotiations would be done in the future to eventually achieve one or few widely accepted standards. Besides the effort of this workgroup, another significant achievement we may expect is the rise of a new company devoting itself in this field and may grow to be a dominating company just like Google and Facebook had done. The format adopted by this company will be an important standard.
The problem of current proposed formats debates is that very few products of data portability have been in reailty. So these companies are just debating without foundation at present. Until substantial applications of data portability have emerged and been adopted by the public, the debate will not reach its end.
In fact, Twine at Radar Networks is a product that should be aware. But the problem of Twine is that the company seems still want to hold all users solely to their own site. This strategy might be beneficial to Radar Network in short term. But in long-term run, this strategy might be a fatal shortcoming for the company that its leading position might be replaced by new startups. In a word, we are still waiting for the real Web-3.0 innovation; and no products until now (including Twine, the closest one to Web 3.0) are able to carry enough momentum to initiate the hype of Web 3.0 yet.
Your thoughts on Data portability are interesting but quite complex as well. Do you think that once a framework is agreed upon, it will help curb cyber crime? And if so to what extent? Will people be more in control of their information that they have supplied via the Internet?
It will be interesting to see what the trend will be on this concept. A proper framework will no doubt make people more confident in using the web
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