data-portability

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Revision as of 01:38, 5 September 2007 by Tantek (talk | contribs) (added sections, reference to digitalconsumer.org, greatly expanded previous work points explicitly, noted loss of podcast as ironic/sad meta-point)
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Data Portability

Summary

Data portability is about you, the user, being able to move and use your data across space and across time.

Expansions

  • your data - whether you created it or purchased it
  • across space - different websites, different devices, different media
  • across time - archiving at one point in time, retrieving at another point in time, time-shifting in general

Relation to microformats

This was one of the incentives behind the development of microformats, and now microformats are a key enabling building block for data portability in various contexts:

  • contact information portability. hCard has lowered the barrier to sharing contact information on the Web compatibly with the industry standard vCard (RFC 2426) format.
  • event portability. With hCalendar, it is possible to upload an event from one calendar site to another and the portability of iCalendar (RFC 2445) data has also been enhanced for the Web.
  • social-network-portability
  • ...

Previous Work

Data portability has been an important topic for quite some time, our work today stands on the shoulders of that earlier work. Here are a few illustrative citations/examples: