Marc's Voice
Home LANs + Broadband + Devices

Open Standards Architecture proposal

This is a proposal for an architecture of open standards surrounding the confluence and convergence of media, communications and personal web based publishing.  These standards can be combined with other standards, like Jabber (for messaging) or the OSAF's Chandler efforts (for PIMs) or end up supporting burgeoning standards for digital identity (like PingID) or knowledge management related work - as well. 

Lots of efforts are going on in a 'bottom-up' like fashion, building and patch-quilting on established standards or hacking solutions in a one-off manner.  So this proposal takes the opposite approach with a 'top-down', architected solution - which will take advantage of all the opportunties and technology that exist today - extending them into a synchronized 'mesh' of standards.  This mesh will facilitate the logical evolution of media as it fits into knowledge management, decentralization and new kinds of linking.

Every attempt will be made to keep these standards compatible with existing industry standards (eg. SMIL, .jpg and .gif) and leading commercial standards (eg. Flash, QuickTime, Real, Microsoft Media 9, MPEG, MIDI.) Everything regarding these standards will be available to all - open source.

This architecture can connect media enthusiasts, bloggers, IM addicts, journal keepers, news hounds, educators and creative people together with legal downloading services, photo and storage bureaus, media editing tools, media publishers, Hollywood studios, labels and on-line beheamouths like AOL, Yahoo and MSN.

These 'ad hoc' sets of standard servers, object models, protocols, data structures and APIs will form a mesh across the web, enabling new kinds of tools, interactivity and interactive user experiences.

True digital lifestyles are now possible with the advent of several new generations of CE devices and the spread of wireless technologies.  Legions of content and service providers are waiting to offer incredible new kinds of interactive commerce, information gathering and knowledge management capabilities.  There's plenty of bandwidth out there (getting cheaper everyday) and plenty of 'down on their luck' partners, marketeers and sales peopple - ready to pump out SOMETHING through the cyber channels of the web - now that eBay, Amazon and AOL have proved THAT part of the cyber dream a reality.

But without the right software to connect all these devices, functionality and potential together - we're still stuck with the priests running things for the church goers (only this time the priests have pierced lips, tatooes and they run Linux.)  We need to make organizing, using and communicating with media substantially easier and more powerful and integrate our media and digital identities into a world of communicating and on-line publishing.

We have tried to address and include all of the major players in this arena, leveraging off of their strengths and the established infrastructures in place already.

The architecture includes:

• proposals for new types of micro-content, and associated object models, protocols and server to support these new types

• focus on enabling new capabilties and ease of use - for end-users - creating and maintaining new kinds of on-line communities

 • ways for all tool developers and vendors to participate and benefit

• tie into and support existing tools, products, legacy systems and standards

Proposals for standards - leveraging XML-RPC, RSS and OPML:

- Intro to Open Standards Architecture

- Open Standards Architecture

- Free Media Management

- Frameworks (coming soon!)

- Compound Document Architecture (this'll take some time - sorry!)

Public Servers:

- Multimedia Conversations

- Shared databases of Reviews

- Media Galleries 

- People

- Topics

Benefits:

- Multiple ways to do the same thing

- Connecting disparate Islands together

- Going beyond just links

- Everybody has media - somewhere

- Digital Lifestyle

Constituents:

- those who would benefit from using the standards

- those who would create, adopt and support the standards

- those would would make money (or even more money than they already do now) because of the standards

Standards - Formats - APIs

- XML-RPC - and/or SOAP (everything is a web service)

- OPML (everything is an outline)

- RSS (everything can be subscribed to)

- Object Models (everything is an object)

- APIs (everything has wires attached to it and can be accessed from the outside

Actions to take - Agenda - Schedule

- discuss the proposals and standards - iterate, refine and perfect them.  Establish project eGroups and talk about holes, existing standards sufficiency and migration paths.

- schedule a meeting (at some conference, maybe a bunch of conferences)

- have our own meeting - decide who does what.  Set up .org?

- all by the end of Q2 '03

- Q3 '03 - first code available - the mesh forms

- Q4 '03 - interchange, registries, shared databases, tools - all working in tandem

Return to Intro to Open Standards Architecture