WebhostingDay: Open-Xchange to Initiate Open Data Cloud

Laguna de la Vera wants soon to release an open specification and implementation that extracts contacts out of social networks and converts them into an open microformat. Desired applications, such as Open-Xchange, can then read and further process this data.

At WHD09 he showed how Open-Xchange can flow this data into HTML pages, whereby the contacts on these pages can be made accessible to other users. There would also be access controls. A typical use scenario that Laguna mentioned was address synchronizations so that users can match their contacts in groupware, such as in the Xing social network. A further example comes new-to-build work or interest groups that, according to appropriate access controls, can view the datasets of each other in order to get in contact.

The specification and reference implementation that Laguna wants to put under GPL should help rework datasets, from sources such as Facebook, into desired applications. Input on this from the community is welcome, says Laguna.