Hello,
Despite the silence in the mailing list, the OASIS WEMI initiative has not been inactive, far from it, and in this email we would like to present the work that has been done so far!
A little history
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The WEMI TC was created as an effort define a standard for content interoperability, in a more content-centric format than the very document-centric CMIS standard.
During the initial phase of the standard process, a few interesting developments came up, such as the ideas of using common URIs for different contextual or non-contextual results but differentiating on request parameters (such as Accept HTTP headers). The most interesting development came from the notion that context information could be very interesting in a lot of use cases.
Aside from the work inside the technical committee, new developments in the area of content exchange such as REST HATEOS have also rendered less important the need for a real pure content exchange standard. The WEMI TC took this into account to “reboot” it’s work to focus on more value-added work.
Trading Chairs
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Shortly into the process, Adobe suddenly disappeared completely from OASIS - and therefore we lost both our chair and secretary. Following this, understandably, a few members were confused by the whole situation and did not pursue work on this standard. Thomas Sigdestad and myself (Serge Huber) became co-chair as we believed that the real “gold” of this standard was still to be found, and took over the lead of this project.
Context is king
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We have identified that the missing part in the puzzle is not content, but context. This basically means that by being able to exchange context between systems, we are able to create richer and better web (and digital) experiences all over.
Context exchange is very interesting, as it is an area in which there is very little standardization, yet the need for exchange is really strong. When integrating for example an e-commerce system with an ad-serving system, wouldn’t it be great to be able to track event and users flowing between the systems, and be able to use this for instance in a WCM?
Although many systems collecting and analyzing user context already exist, every implementation is different and mostly incompatible - not to mention all the different APIs.
Standardizing personalization
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We have conducted weekly workshops for a while - and focused on defining both the use-cases and the first real ideas on context exchange.
The new WEMI specification draft we are presenting today aims to fill this void by proposing new ways of building, updating and exchanging context information in a very personalized way. You may think of it as a standard to make personalization systems truly interoperable. Not only does this have the potential of making system more compatible and therefore cheaper to integrate, it also has the potential to open new opportunities for end-users to better control the information that is gathered about them and potentially control it if such a system allows it.
The context server
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Central to the new specification is the WEMI Context Server. This server is a “centralized” server that is highly scalable and capable of serving the context of the user interactions with the different systems involved. In a similar way that an identity server tracks the user’s identities in different server applications, the WEMI Context server tracks relevant user data and actions across these systems.
We are of course early into the specification writing, and we would like to gather feedback on the work done so far. The current document presents the overall idea, example use cases and the potential object model and interactions, while the API section is still much a work in progress, as we went through many iterations of the designs.
We hope that this new approach will seem as interesting to you as it is to us, and that you will help us promote and improve it.
The document allows any one with the link to post comments, so feel free to comment directly on the document or in this list.
Best regards,
Thomas & Serge, WEMI co-chairs.
- -- --- -----=[ shuber at jahia dot com ]=---- --- -- -
CTO & Co-founder - Jahia Solutions Group, 9 Routes de Jeunes, 1227 Acacias, Switzerland
twitter:
@sergehuber
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