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Open Web Foundation

I think this one has been brewing for quite some time - the Open Web Foundation is pulling together a number of specifications under the umbrella of a single foundation.

The Open Web Foundation was announced by David Recordon of SixApart at OSCON yesterday.

The new foundation is to "create a home for community-driven specifications" such as oAuth and OpenID as well -if the slides are anything to go by - as the currently very proprietary Google Gadgets.

On the one hand I think this is certainly a step in the right direction for getting these specifications onto a stable footing. On the other hand, what about IETF? What about W3C? What about ISO? What about UN/CEFACT? I'd like to see a good rationale for why none of these existing organisations are unsuitable for the kind of work being discussed. Do they take too long? Are they full of your competitors? Are they too undemocratic? Too democratic? This is a very serious issue, especially as in the Google case, W3C have been working on non-proprietary open specifications in the same areas.

One argument is that the new body should purely focus on IPR management. This is certainly one area of concern with community specifications, and tackling it would be very useful. However, this would then require a very hands-off approach by the organisation, which is maintained without the urge to control the direction of the specifications themselves. Already discussions are taking place about what criteria the organisation would set up as to what projects it would accept, and what processes it will have to develop.

For example, would the OWF incubate a competitor to oAuth? If not, why not, and how would it make that decision?

If the OWF really can pull off a lightweight approach to IPR management for specifications then this could be a useful initiative, but the relationship with, in particular, the W3C and IETF needs to be explained much more clearly, and the role corporate interests are playing (Google, Yahoo!) in its development made explicit, before we know if the OWF is a good place to work on interoperability issues.

If Atom (or Pie as it used to be called) was being developed now, would it now join OWF, or would it still offer its spec to IETF to become an open standard? What would be the difference?

More coverage over at TechCrunch

I'm still here!

Its been quite a while since my last blog post, for which I place them blame largely on Twitter, so here is a brief roundup of what I've been up to lately.

XCRI

I've been really busy with XCRI recently as part of the efforts to harmonize the different specifications for course advertising and syndication across the EU. There is no a draft model out for consultation that we intend to submit for a European standard. There's a lot of enthusiasm for this (see my post on the XCRI blog about the Athens Declaration) and so I'm pretty hopeful that not only will we see a new lightweight EU standard for course advertising, but we'll also see all national initiatives adapting to it in a relatively short period of time. Certainly as soon as the standard is agreed we're planning to make the changes to the XCRI spec needed to conform to it.

ARGOSI

This is an Alternate Reality Game project I've been working on. The first rule of ARGOSI is you don't talk about ARGOSI.

On The Horizon

If you haven't already done so, check out the series of blog posts on Mark Feldstein's blog. These are all about the papers we're writing for a special issue of OTH, and I'm writing one of these with Kamala here at Bolton. I think this is going to be a really good journal issue and well worth getting hold of - I'm just worried about making sure our contribution is as thought-provoking as some of the other papers.

Widgets & Wookies

We've been working on using the W3C Widgets spec as the basis for making and delivering collaborative widgets that can be distributed across lots of platforms, both personal and institutional, using a piece of OSS we've developed called Wookie. Some more info in this interview. I'm really excited about this work, and we hope to have some really good stuff about it online soon.

FeedForward

My partner on the project, Kris, had to take some extra leave so we had to put back the release of the next version of the application. We're still planning to get out a new version before the Autumn. Thanks to erveryone whose got in touch asking about how we've been doing!

Conferences, unconferences and so on

I've recently attended EUNIS 2008 in Denmark, and the JISC Innovation Forum at Keele. I've also been along to the CRIG barcamp. However other people have written far more timely and informative posts about all of these things! Next up I've got:

• ALT-C (are especially the Fringe, F-ALT)
• the IMS Quarterly meeting here in the UK
• MUPPLE

There has been a lot more going on, but those are the headlines for now...

Ignore this post

No really, its a technorati claims thing

Technorati Profile

Pachube: Connecting things that sense things

I'm not sure what I'd use this for, but its certainly cool and very cybernetic. Pachube is a service for tagging objects that share data from their sensors.

Services like Pachube could be useful for some kinds of very high-level business intelligence, particularly analyses that cross organisational or national boundaries.

At the moment, however, it does have the feel of a webcams site with graphs and XML, but as more objects, places and devices get wired (or wireless) then something like Pachube becomes an inevitable evolution.

Perhaps someone will find some interesting way of using some of these sensors in one of the many mashup competitions making the rounds currently.

oAuth: Putting users in control of service-to-service communications

I've been talking about oAuth a lot to colleagues recently; I'd had it vaguely on my radar for a while, but a conversation with David Recordon from SixApart at EduServ last year convinced me to take a more serious interest in the specification. oAuth is essentially a user-centric authorization mechanism for enabling services to talk to each other.

Currently some services enable interoperability by getting the user to delegate authority to the service to interact with another, essentially by enabling it to impersonate the user. For example, you give Flickr your LiveJournal account details so it can cross-post your photos.

With oAuth, the same functionality is enabled without the security, trust and privacy compromises: the user talks to both services and explicitly grants permission for the services to talk, but without revealing any account details.

There are a great many service-to-service contracts that could benefit from this user-centric approach: employers and universities, for example. Or between employers and applicant's portfolio services.

But is oAuth actually being adopted? Well, the evidence suggests it is, with Google announcing adoption, and discussing integration with its OpenSocial and Google Gadgets technology. For Google this replaces its proprietary AuthSub mechanism with one that can be shared across providers.

For eLearning, the oAuth spec is an important building block in developing distributed as well as federated elearning architecture. With oAuth, users can choose to connect together services that have no existing relationships using a common authorization method.

Even better, oAuth is completely agnostic with regard to identity and authentication protocols and models - it doesn't need single sign-on or any kind of shared identity or authentication model between service providers.

The bottom line - if you are developing an application that needs to talk to an external service API on behalf of the user, then you may need to start looking into oAuth.

More Social Metadata: APML and ULML

While a lot of recent attention has focussed on the issue of social graph portability, there are a couple of other interesting developments in social metadata I've come across lately.

APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) is a means of sharing an individual attention profile. While other specs (such as the seemingly-dead AttentionXML) have focussed on the tracking of attention in terms of individual clicks, APML is concerned with the mobility of a more coarse-grained profile, consisting of a collection of weighted concepts, either self-asserted or aggregated from services.

The spec is generally simple enough to implement, despite a few odd design choices, consisting basically of a list of "concepts" (keywords or labels) and "sources" (URLs) that are of interest to the subject, all of which have a weighting from 0 to 1 and some additional metadata about where the weightings come from.

APML is currently undergoing revision to reach 1.0 status, and so we can see quite a few possible changes, but its worth having a look at if you're thinking of developing applications that make use of individual interest profiles for personalisation. It should be fairly trivial to support users exporting or importing such a profile.

ULML (User Labor Markup Language) is a specification for tracking the metrics of user participation in social web services. A ULML document provides statistics on a user's interactions with the service; as the developers put it:

"User labor is the work that people put in to create, improve, and maintain their existence in social web"

ULML provides a way of presenting the volume of user activities such as generating content, tagging, voting and commenting. It also allows for the sharing of metrics concerning reactions to their participation - incoming views, comments, bookmarks and so on. Overall the intent is to quantify in some fashion the economic value of social participation, potentially to enable greater transparency about how user's participation with a service is valued to advertisers and other services that support (typically free) social web applications and to power things like meta-markets.

Some rather simple metrics are already used on forums to rank the value of contributors and encourage more participation - typically based on the number of posts alone. Using the more comprehensive - yet still quite simple - metrics available in ULML may allow better comparisons of relative levels of commitment, engagement, and value generation with multiple social web services.

Its an interesting concept, and could possibly have some use in evaluating engagement and participation in more general terms for services without such an economic rationale such as elearning applications. For example, to quantitatively compare the relative commitment of students to VLEs versus Facebook, or to measure the value generated by staff in shared services. It may also be possible to find a way of using it to quantize the work of researchers who share their work by blogging and using social networks as well as by traditional academic publishing.

I think its fair to say neither APML or ULML is going mainstream anytime soon, but are sufficiently simple to implement that they may be worth exploring if you're developing applications that have a social angle.

Beginning of the next memory S-curve?

How about an iPod that holds millions of songs. In fact, why not all of them? Want to replace that hard drive with a solid state one with 1000 times the capacity? Oh, and everything stays nice and stable when the power goes off, for far longer than today's flash memory. Like to guess how far away this is?

Technology development often exhibits an S-Curve pattern; first you get the slow buildup as it takes time to get an idea of the ground, then increasing growth, and finally a slowdown of diminishing returns. Then eventually you hit the start of the next "S" and you're soon back into exponential growth. Sometimes you're lucky enough to spot the next "S" starting, and I think recent developments are pointing to a new "S" in computer memory.

(S-Curve diagram by Laird Close, University of Arizona)

The last few weeks saw three major announcements on the development of memory and solid-state storage.

First of all, IBM Research announced it was close to cracking 'Racetrack' nano-magnetic memory. This proof-of-concept technology would eventually replace flash memory and hard drives, with vastly greater capacity.

Next up, researchers from Daresbury and Glasgow have announced developments that could increase memory capacity even further, to "hundreds of thousands of times more capacity" using innovative nanotechnology (Nature Nanotechnology, 3, 289 - 233 (2008) ).

Finally, HP Labs have added the "memristor" to the basic building blocks of electronics. Memristors are resitstors that store information even after losing power, and do so for longer than conventional flash memory. Whats more, memristors are in principle far simpler and easier to make than flash memory, which could also accelerate the trend towards ubiquitous solid-state memory.

Now, whats our plan for when students start turning up with something the size of today's Google sat in their pocket?

W3C releases working drafts for Widgets 1.0 specification

This week sees another milestone in W3C's effort to standardize the use of Widgets across platforms with the release of the Widgets v1.0 working draft documents. The specification aims to offer a single way of creating and distributing widgets on a range of platforms.

The current scope of the W3C work is set out in the Requirements document. W3C defines Widgets simply as:

mall client-side Web applications for displaying and updating remote data, that are packaged in a way to allow a single download and installation on a client machine, mobile phone, or mobile Internet device. Typical examples of widgets include clocks, CPU gauges, sticky notes, battery-life indicators, games, and those that make use of Web services, like weather forecasters, news readers, email checkers, photo albums and currency converters.

Another document, the Widget Landscape sets out the lay of the land in terms of what Widget platforms are out there, and how they approach the different aspects of Widget functionality.

The specification is targeting platforms such as Apple Dashboard, Microsoft Sidebar, Yahoo! Konfabulator, and mobile platforms such as WidSets. Web widgets, such as Google Gadgets, are not currently in scope, although when you dig into the details of the specification, its obvious that web widgets can potentially be developed in a similar manner.

After requirements, the first specification document is Packaging and Configuration which defines the zip-based format used to package the content of a Widget, the structure of the XML configuration document that goes inside it, and other aspects such as discovery and internationalization.

A surprising omission at this stage is the API specification. All Widget container platforms supply an API, typically accessed via JavaScript, that offers the Widget a way of storing and retrieving preferences, calling remote services, and executing various kinds of commands. Presumably this will be released next; currently there is only an Editor's Draft of "APIs and Events". Currently a developer of a Widget needs to make different API calls based on where the Widget is deployed to do very basic things like save and retrieve user settings.

Another aspect of a Widget API is extended features, especially in the case of web Widgets. The Google OpenSocial API is an example of an extended Widget API - in this case to enable Widgets to access things like friends lists and status information. Another is the widget collaboration API we developed here as part of our EU TenCompetence project, that enable things like activity-based chat and voting widgets to be developed using the draft W3C specification. (More on that in another post sometime).

Overall I think there is some great work going on in this W3C group, with a very practical focus that is based on taking a consensus view of "what is" rather than a more purist "what should be" approach (which has characterised some of the W3C's other recent work). I hope that once this spec is finalized the focus will move onto taking a similar approach to web widgets, for which there is an even more pressing need for interoperability. Our own work has shown that, with a few minor modifications (e.g. the addition to the API of a proxy method for safe tunneling of external Web API calls around cross-site script access restrictions), exactly the same model of packaging, manifest and API can also work within a web framework.

For more information on this and related activities, also check out the rest of the Web Application Formats Working Group pages.

The Next Open Frontier: Hardware

I've waxed on about fabbers and the like for some time on this blog and elsewhere, so I was suitably impressed by this presentation on open source hardware by Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone. It sets out the various aspects that make up the "source" of an object, from bill of materials to circuit design, and the standards for exchanging them.

Of course this is at the rather more technical end of the fabject continuum. At the other there is the amazing Ponoko site, which enables users to create their designs from regular EPS files, pick the materials, and then have them laser-cut to order. Designers can choose to sell the cut and/or assembled product, or to sell or give away the design as EPS files.

Currently the custom fabjects are a little pricey compared to their mass-produced compatriots, and the processes limited in terms of materials and processes. But add in cheaper 3D printing and other fabbing technologies, and simple programmable wireless platforms like SPOT and Bug, and we'll soon be churning out spimes on demand.

Clickpass

Its interesting how we've gone beyond the backend aspects of OpenID and the focus is now on honing the user experience. Clickpass aims to streamline the login process by prefilling the user's OpenID URL within a single login button.

Its a nice idea and seems to work pretty well, but I think that CardSpace is probably a better bet in the medium term. Clickpass gets over the "remember the URL" problem, but doesn't have anything to say on the anti-Phishing issue, whereas CardSpace could in principle tackle both at the same time. Still, in the short term this could be a really good way to increase adoption.

A more pragmatic solution was presented by David Recordon of SixApart in a speech at EduServ last year, which is to ask users not for their OpenID URL, but for things like their AOL Screen name and other easily-remembered identifiers which can be used by a service to easily construct the OpenID URL based on the patterns that providers like AOL use to create OpenIDs.

Finally, there is also the option to have this kind of functionality built into the browser itself - put your OpenID URL into the browser preferences, and have it populate the login button rather than have Clickpass as an intermediary.

Via OLDAily