XTech 2008
Last week, Dublin saw a gathering of software engineers, information architects and technologists to discuss at the annual conference.
For years we have been developing and promoting open data standards, enabling data portability. Recent developments have led to web-wide programming APIs and virtualization. It's no longer just our data on the move, it's our applications and even our servers too.
A few of us were there to talk about the programme ontology, the upcoming ´óÏó´«Ã½ , and .
Image of Brendan Quinn by
As you might expect, there's a real sense that we are at a tipping point - a sense that the technologies are starting to enable a new set of opportunities. But this isn't just wishful thinking - there are more companies adopting the underlying technologies which enable data sharing and portability.
As of noted in , open software and hardware have become hip and have given small groups of developers the chance to build interesting web apps - and, more importantly, the chance to get them adopted. This is a new wave of web companies which expose their data via and consume others' APIs. And what is interesting about these companies is that they are converging on common standards - in particular, OAuth and OpenID.
is a way to share abstract information. It allows you to authorise third party applications and rights over specific features in other applications.
So, for example, you can authorise (a service that lets you share travel plans with your friends) to find other Dopplr users within your email account without having to give Dopplr your email address and password. (Giving your password to other people or services is, by the way, a .)
And speaking of OAuth, it was great to hear announce that from June 1st, will be supporting OAuth alongside the existing Flickr Authentication API. I think that this is really going to be the year we see large-scale adoption of OAuth, which is a good thing: after all, there really is nothing not to like.
The other technology that has quite a buzz about it is , a messaging and presence protocol. Wednesday afternoon saw , and stand in for to run .
Parts of the web are becoming more and more about real-time conversation - see the rise of and the recent release of instant messaging in and presence services like and . isn't a great solution to deliver this kind of real-time data. It's not great because it's very inefficient - to keep up to date, a client application needs to poll the server every few seconds to check whether there's an update and the server needs to deal with this request, even if there is no update. But it needs to work this way round, because http can't push or broadcast information. XMPP can, because it can notify all of the clients that have subscribed to the XMPP server of the update.
Here at the ´óÏó´«Ã½, Matt Wood has been playing around with XMPP, exposing EPG data via XMPP:
At the start of every radio broadcast I'm publishing metadata about that show to its station's node, wrapped in an Atom Entry. For your Linked Data entertainment it's also serialised as Turtle RDF conforming to the Programmes Ontology.
Image: "Rob Lee on Using socially authored content to provide new routes through existing content archives" by
A final thought: it's also nice to hear about organisations that are exposing their data in machine-readable formats. In addition to our own work on exposing ´óÏó´«Ã½ programme metadata as , , and , Jeni Tennison from the UK's Stationary Office presented their work to add to the London Gazette.
Comment number 1.
At 12th May 2008, Ed Lyons wrote:My worry about OpenID and OAuth, without know much about them, beyond their aims, is that they make what is fairly simple now, much more complex - for both the software developer and more importantly, the user. As we've seen, people are terribly about privacy on the internet, they'll give out their details left right and centre, so unless using OpenID and OAuth are trivial from a user's perspective, they're going to have problems.
I really like the ideas behind them. I run a number of fairly small e-commerce websites and I'd be interested in using OpenID with my sites, but I don't want to scare off my customers with something new. This is where the ´óÏó´«Ã½ can help - they can make the two systems publicly known, liked and useful. Until then, I'll stick with using my own customer database.
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Comment number 2.
At 12th May 2008, Orville Eastland wrote:Hmm...this may be off-topic, but I was wondering- did ´óÏó´«Ã½ have permission to use those LEGO images?
If not, could LEGO go after the ´óÏó´«Ã½ like the ´óÏó´«Ã½ went after the person who posted the Doctor Who knitting patterns?
(I apologize for being off topic, but I think this would be an interesting issue for this blog to address...)
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Comment number 3.
At 15th May 2008, Nick Reynolds wrote:´óÏó´«Ã½ Worldwide have now commented on the Open Rights Group blog. See this link:
Nick Reynolds (editor, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Internet blog)
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Comment number 4.
At 20th Jun 2008, Lemonshell wrote:I often wander why people do not need permission to use lego images on youtube
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