Building a framework and open-source it to people has been in the pipelines for a while now. Finally, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft have partnered to get together and make it happen. And quite to the universal excitement, it has come across quite well.
Introducing the DTP
The tech giants came together to bring about something that was only dreamt of. These four tech giants have come together to build a framework that is entirely focused on data portability. This has been, quite simply, named as Data Transfer Project or abbreviated as DTP. DTP is an open source initiative that aims to offer a framework, through which companies can create tools that allow people to transfer data from one platform to another without any hustle. In simpler terms, it means that you would not have to download and upload data over and over again every time.
Information flow at the core
The DTP comes with all guns blazing as companies are not holding information about the project to themselves. “Right now, much of the online products and services we use do not interact with each other in a coherent and intuitive fashion,” wrote Damien Kieran, the Data protection officer at Twitter. He wrote this in a blog post while intending to announce the project.
He says more about the project as he continues, “information that is housed on one platform cannot be easily and securely transferred to other services. This is not a positive collective experience for the people who use our services and we are keen to work through some of the challenges as an industry.”
Why is the DTP is so anticipated?
Because it comes with an open source, that is to say, that it is a completely transparent system of processes. To solidify this, Kieran writes in his blog post, “in keeping with our overarching principles around transparency and accountability, this process of information sharing between our companies and the related work streams will be open for all to scrutinise, critique, and to build off.”
One of the biggest partners of the team that has gotten together to achieve the DTP – Google – adds to the discussion its valued opinion. It says that the organisations which are currently involved into making tools for the DTP are creating tools that can convert any service’s proprietary APIs or Application Program Interface to and even from a small set of data formats which are standardised. This makes the transfer of data across platforms a lot easier using “industry-standard infrastructure and authorisation mechanism, such as OAuth.”
Last word by Facebook
One of the most controversial members of this partnership, Facebook, says that the four companies involved are “…committed to building a common way for people to transfer data into and out of online services.”
Facebook says that the DTP is in its early stages of formation and hopes that more and more organisations and organisational experts get involved with the project.
The unification of resources to build a more secure and formidable data transfer platform which does not tamper or make essential data vulnerable is the whole motive of the DTP.
