Open standards like XDI will play a key role in the evolution of “Cloud 2.0” applications, those that blend naturally into the evolving and integrating social media & cloud ecosystem.
Hand in hand with the ongoing application virtualization aspects of the Cloud into a single global compute resource, there is also the same ongoing trend at the data level too, and where they meet is the super sweet hot spot for technology ventures right now. Where ‘Facebook meets Amazon’ so to speak.
The concept is nicely illustrated by the main man himself, Sir Tim BL, in this article ‘Socially Aware Cloud Storage‘.
This refers to a distributed (Cloud) storage service that is used to store personal user data for social networks, rather than the social sites holding it themselves. He touches on startup ventures like Diaspora who are looking to launch this type of model.
Sir Tim describes this within a context of ‘Linked Data‘, where the data is joined up like in a database but at the web level through the same linking mechanism that joins content to form the world wide web. Therefore the fundamental shift is that rather than storing data centrally, in a database, and accessing it via a distributed content tool (the web), you would simply distribute data the same way.
This concept of a “Dataweb” (like the www is a ‘Contentweb’) is also the same vision behind XDI, the OASIS standard for a similar capability. In this white paper (21 page PDF) the author describes how it would implement a ‘Dataweb’ of linked information the same way, and on his blog Drummond Reed also describes the same type of ecosystem as Diaspora, calling it ‘the Personal Cloud‘. In the Identity community this has also been termed the ‘Personal Data Ecosystem‘ (PDS).
Certain features of XDI explain key important points about this system, most notably ‘Link Contracts‘ – These are the actual mechanisms of linking data, because they define the nature of how it is linked, and so builds into this the critical privacy protection factors, such as respecting your wishes for who can and can’t access and use your data.
Naturally such a radical change to how information is stored will impact the software that uses it. Sir Tim describes a marketplace of open software engineered to work with this PDS – We call these Cloud 2.0 Applications, and will be building up a knowledge base of how these and other open standards intersect with Cloud infrastructure this way.
