Emerging Standards for Mashups and The OpenSAM Community
ZDNet posted a great article called “Standards Support for Mashups Emerge” (by Dion Hinchliffe). The article takes a look at the landscape of standards for mashups including OpenSocial, OpenSAM, OpenFriend, S-Mash, OpenAjax, OpenID, DataPortability.org, etc. remarking about the value of such standards to interconnect online applications. He also focuses in on OpenSAM as one of the best standards to emerge for mashups as follows:
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But the most comprehensive and detailed plan for bringing standard approaches and techniques to mashups has to be OpenSAM, which leverages many existing standards such as WebDAV, openid, LDAP, and also subscribes to DataPortability.org’s standards to create a consistent and well-organized design and interaction model for offering complex, heterogeneous mashups to both the consumer and business community. Even more importantly, they cite a good number of companies already offering Web applications that support OpenSAM. The OpenSAM vision is broad and focused across the usage spectrum and the OpenSAM folks say that “once OpenSAM is added to an application, it can immediately join mashups with all other OpenSAM applications.”
and also:
- OpenSAM. A comprehensive and sophisticated set of standards and documented practices for creating mashups. OpenSAM is very advanced in that it support a wide range mashup capabilities including discovery, provisioning, branding, identity, workflow, document storage, meta-data and more. OpenSAM lists a number of existing products that implement it today and it also provides many of the look and feel standards that many users will find helpful as they encounter more and more applications built on a mashup approach.
We are honored to see this type of recognition for OpenSAM and it is a validation for all of the hard work from the participants. We look forward to expanding upon the groundwork and taking OpenSAM to new levels of utility for the industry.
The OpenSAM consortium of which ShareMethods is a co-founder has also launched a community forum in Google Groups. Check it out at http://groups.google.com/group/opensam. If you are a member or prospective member of OpenSAM, please join the OpenSAM group. Listen to our ideas, share your suggestions, and help to make OpenSAM as powerul as possible. Currently, in a project with OpenSAM members, we are exploring ways in which to have a slimmed down version of OpenSAM to make it very easy to connect apps in just a few hours, a starting point from which applications can expand to richer functionality as home and productivity apps. We are also exploring the possibility of adding multimedia apps to the existing categories of home and productivity apps and looking at linkages with existing data standard initiatives such as DataPortability.org. In eveny event, please check out the OpenSAM community and if you like it, please sign up and participate.
