Have you ever noticed how many times you re-enter information about yourself at web pages? Have you ever noticed how information at one website can’t be reused at another? Have you ever noticed how many promises of privacy there are — And how many breaches that occur anyway? Have you ever noticed the number of organizations that see all of this simply as a password problem? A data portability problem?
What if there was another way? What if there was something beyond a single log-in? What if there was an approach that made privacy a core part of the Internet’s architecture? What if there was an approach that moved beyond the whole browser paradigm and the limitations of HTML and web pages? What if there was a new language for the Internet, built around you and not web pages?
CLOUD is building that language. CLOUD is the Consortium for Local Ownership and Use of Data. We are a non-profit technology standard consortia started in early 2009 that believes that a new era of ME 1.0 is at hand, an era that looks beyond Web 2.0, while simultaneously looking to the founding principles of the Internet as the solution to many of today’s most vexing issues of privacy, security and data.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Ebay, E*Trade, Yahoo, and Google don’t own your information. You do. CLOUD’s aim is to make it easier for them to serve you and easier for you to get better services. By improving the Internet’s connections, we can flip the Internet back to being about people — back to being about you. From social networks to healthcare to education to finance and beyond, it is not just a data problem. It is a people problem.
We have developed four short, succinct vignettes to explain the philosophy and thinking behind CLOUD, as well as its basic architectural concepts. You can view them in any order, but they are presented here in the way in which we like to tell the story.
CLOUD and the Internet
The Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same. Understanding this is the first step to understanding the core principles behind CLOUD, Inc.
CLOUD and ME 1.0
Web 2.0 defined the evolution of the HTML-based era of the Internet. ME 1.0 defines the next evolution of the Internet itself. It is a whole new way of thinking about how the Internet works. This vignette walks through a day in the life of a social networker to make the idea of ME 1.0 clear.
CLOUD and the Power of WHO
What if there was an API for you? Not a password… not another log-in… but a language of WHO. WHO I Am is one of the fundamental CLOUD constructs for ushering in the era of ME 1.0. It is one of the four pillars of the contextual markup language (CTML) that CLOUD is building.
Connecting WHO and WHAT in the CLOUD
Current proponents of the Semantic Web view the challenge of web pages as a data problem. CLOUD sees it as a people problem. Connecting WHO I Am to WHAT I Am is how the two become fused in a new future of ME 1.0. WHAT I Am is the second of the four pillars of CTML.
