The Open Data Definition for Data Portability
On the 28th of April, Ben Werdmuller introduced the Open Data Definition in a guest post on Steve O’Hear’s blog. The Open Data Definition http://opendd.net/ is one of the most recent efforts to build Data Portability between Social Networks and user data, for import and export of data between social sites. He discusses the current (what he refers to as) “half-solutions” available for transferring data, such as services giving the user access to his data through third party tools, and other existing solutions, such as SOAP, RDF and FOAF. However, it is lamentable that he focuses on dismissing the usefulness of such languages by pointing out their shortcomings, for example, saying that RDF is “…prone to ambiguity and overcomplicated implementation”. However, this may be part of a marketing strategy for his application, the ODD built into Elgg, the open source social application engine. Any reference to Google Open Social API is also noticeably missing from the post.