ICWE 2008 Workshops, 7th Int. Workshop on Web-Oriented Software Technologies – IWWOST 2008 Architecture for Integrating Desktop and Web 2.0 Data Management Stefania Leone, Michael Grossniklaus, Moira C. Norrie Institute for Information Systems ETH Zurich CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland leone, grossniklaus, norrie @inf.ethz.ch { } Abstract work activities. Thus, friendships might be managed by Facebook, while professional networks and contact infor- A new form of personal information fragmentation is mation may be managed by sites such as LinkedIn or Xing. arising due to the rapid growth in Web 2.0 applications and Clearly, this development in terms of how the Web their use for the management of data typically associated is used for personal information management (PIM), also with desktop applications. We propose a data management raises several technical challenges with regard to data man- architecture that allows data to be shared between desktop agement. While the Web is an ideal platform for collabo- and Web 2.0 applications. The architecture supports a sep- ration and participation, Web applications generally cannot aration of concerns between the management of personal compete with desktop applications in terms of complexity data and its publication on the Web to social networks. and integration into the local working environment. Fur- ther, while a few approaches have been proposed to enable users to work with Web 2.0 applications offline, currently 1 Introduction desktop applications still cope better with this requirement. Therefore, it is not to be expected that Web 2.0 applica- Web 2.0 is the term often used to describe the Web’s evo- tions will replace desktop applications entirely, but rather lution from a hypertext publishing system [2] into a plat- that the two kinds of applications will be used for differ- form of participation and collaboration [18]. In Web 2.0, ent tasks and modes of working. However, they may share content is not only delivered to users, but users actively data which means that, ideally, there should be some way of participate by augmenting and creating content. As a con- seamlessly managing data across desktop applications and sequence, content is no longer created locally and then Web 2.0 applications. published to the Web, but rather managed entirely online. The distribution of information across desktop applica- In essence, Web 2.0, together with Rich Internet Applica- tions and Web 2.0 applications introduces further forms of tions (RIA), are taking over some of the functionality of information fragmentation already considered to be one of traditional desktop applications. the main issues of PIM with respect to desktop applications. In particular, several Web 2.0 sites have emerged that We believe that new forms of data management architec- allow personal information to be managed collaboratively tures are required that can provide an integrated approach to over the Web. Personal data can be of different types and data management for desktop and Web 2.0 applications with can be categorised into two main groups. First, there is data a clear separation of concerns between the management of which formerly has been managed locally by desktop appli- personal data and its publication on the Web to social net- cations, such as contacts, documents or pictures. Second, works. One of the main technical requirements is to provide there is a lot of personal data which has only emerged be- ways in which data can be synchronised between desktop cause of the Web, such as bookmarks or any kind of meta- applications and Web 2.0 applications. However, such an data associated with media content. Web 2.0 applications approach should also incorporate concepts that have proven that manage such personal information include sites such as useful in Web 2.0 applications. One such feature that can be Flickr and YouTube for images and videos, Blogs for writ- witnessed on sites such as Facebook is the ability to extend ing diaries or travel journals, Google Documents for man- these platforms based on plug-ins or modules. In order to aging and sharing documents or del.icio.us for Web book- successfully manage data for Web 2.0, we believe that the marks. It is important to note that while some of these sites data management architecture should reflect this notion of focus on a user’s private life, others are closely related to components. 13 ICWE 2008 Workshops, 7th Int. Workshop on Web-Oriented Software Technologies – IWWOST 2008 In this paper, we first motivate the need for a data man- Although there is a lack of detailed studies on how agement architecture that bridges the gap between the desk- Web 2.0 applications are being used to manage personal top and Web 2.0 and then present our approach that is in- data, general surveys such as [14] show that social net- tended for the development of data-centric applications. We working sites such as Facebook are heavily used for manag- begin in Section 2 with a background discussion of the state ing and sharing personal data such as photos in addition to of the art in developing Web 2.0 applications as well as cur- keeping in touch with friends. It should be emphasised that rent solutions in the domain of personal information man- personal data includes work-related data and not just data agement. Section 3 provides an in-depth analysis of the related to one’s private life. For example, increasingly re- challenges and requirements that must be met by any in- searchers are managing personal data related to their work tegrated approach to data management for Web 2.0 appli- such as contacts, bookmarks and information about their cations. In Section 4, we then propose an architecture that publications on the Web. addresses the requirements defined in the previous section. This shift from desktop data management to Web 2.0 Preliminary results and future work is discussed in Sec- data management raises a set of new issues for personal data tion 5. Finally, concluding remarks are given in Section 6. management. For example, it has become popular for users to publish collections of photos on various Web sites such as 2 Background Flickr and Facebook, in order that they can share this data with friends. But, typically, users also keep local copies of this data. Sometimes they even publish different or the In this section, we first review the data management fea- same photos to different Web 2.0 sites in order that they can tures of Web 2.0 applications and then go on to describe ap- share it with different communities. As a result, the data proaches that have been adopted in the PIM research com- objects may be replicated and users need to manually keep munity to address the problems of information fragmenta- track of which photos and which versions of these photos tion on the desktop. have been published to particular sites. Sometimes users As outlined in [18], Web 2.0 is a term used to refer to will make changes to the photos already published in which a category of Web-based applications that have become ex- case some form of synchronisation between the published tremely popular in recent years by defining a set of features and the desktop data is required. that they have in common. These features can be sum- Other types of personal data may be produced directly marised in terms of two main trends. On the one hand, on-line. For example, Blog posts or bookmark collections Web 2.0 applications are characterised by rich and respon- may be created using a Web 2.0 application which means sive user interfaces, and, on the other hand, the user be- that users lose control over that data and they cannot access comes a participant who not only consumes content, but ac- it offline. Also, one of the features of Web 2.0 is that users tively takes part in content creation. author content collaboratively which means that other users There has been a lot of attention given to the de- may tag photos, add comments to posted articles etc. And sign of application development frameworks for the imple- rather than each user having to manually maintain an en- mentation of Rich Internet Applications in both industry tire address book, each user only has to maintain their own e.g. [23, 22, 17] and academic environments e.g. [3, 21]. contact details and they are automatically shared by other However, to date, little attention has been paid to data man- users. agement issues in terms of both detailed studies on the use of Web 2.0 applications for PIM and also tools and infras- As a result, nowadays, personal information is not just tructure for managing and sharing user-generated content. fragmented across desktop applications but also between desktop applications and one or more Web 2.0 applications. An additional feature of many Web 2.0 platforms and ap- A user typically maintains several social networking pro- plications such as Facebook1 and Flickr is the provision of files, for example one for friends and family on Facebook an application development interface (API) which allows an and a Xing or LinkedIn profile for managing business con- application developer to access and retrieve platform data as tacts. Research efforts have already been made to allow the well as to build applications for that platform. The Google aggregation and integration of social networking informa- Open Social API2 is an effort to standardise interfaces to tion from various Web 2.0 applications [13]. In [11] per- social networking applications by defining a platform inde- sonal user data scattered over various Web 2.0 applications pendent interface which can be implemented by any social is integrated by providing an infrastructure for integrating networking application.