Openness Update
Peeling back the curtain on the Ministry of Openness here in the ‘Mine, we’re making excellent progress in the Science Lab. We’ve homed in on a process where we can extract meaning from a few of your feed services that already exist, and we’re iterating over a few more. The goal is to be able to accept the output of open services, derive media preferences, and then use them to feed your MatchKey.
We’re not leaving it there, though. Once the MatchKey is fed and happy, we’re working on streaming derived information back out to close the openness loop. In fact, we’re focussed on leveraging open specifications and emerging standards to simplify the downstream consumption of the data we provide. Initially, it looks like we’ll provide a few RSS feeds for simple interactions, and a richer presentation using the new APML format.
To really deliver on the promise of our open approach, we’re heavily involved in various open standards groups. The most visible of these is the DataPortability Project, a kind of clearing house and guiding body for adopting portable data standards and technologies. Dig a bit deeper into the implementation stack and you’ll find us engaged with groups like the Higgins, Semantic Web, and Linked Data projects.
In short, if you have a URL presenting your interests in RSS, FOAF, APML, RDF, or even XHTML with Microformats, we’ll take it. The working proof of concept is humming along nicely (if not completely stable), and more tuning is underway.
The Engineering group is ramping up to engage with the Ministry, and I’m excited to share the progress as we move forward.
PS Just came back from a meeting to map out our support for OpenID by the end of the quarter. More as it develops.
