Syndication Oriented Architecture (SynOA)

Jon Udell recently interviewed Rohit Khare of CommerceNet Labs for an IT Conversations podcast. The discussion focused on the concept of Syndication Oriented Architecture, or SynOA.



From Khare: (you must register to download the white paper. PPT is available here.)

"Syndication standards are no longer just formats for relaying headline news. Now they can enable 'information agility' for all of the knowledge flowing inside and outside the enterprise....It is not farfetched to consider Facebook as an example of the future of enterprise knowledge management. Its personalization and collaborative filtering features may be at an early stage, but its platform strategy makes clear that its members view the world as a continuous stream of written information and social interactions. This infrastructure for scalable information routing is one of the most broadly used publish/subscribe applications in the world. SynOA outlines the implications of this model, and provides a roadmap for deploying these capabilities -- while complementing Service-Oriented Architectures -- to push relevant information to employees, customers, and partners."

SynOA is broken into five parts:

1. Publication. RSSifing all data feeds.
2. Subscription. Make it easy to remix feeds.
3. Distribution. Wide range of delivery options, smartphones, etc.
   
4. Personalization. What each recipient needs to know, now
   
5. Collaboration. Tapping into the wisdom of crowds to learn from groups.
   

Strip away all the technology and the web is essentially a publishing tool. Libraries publish content in the form of static HTML pages, wikis, or blogs for others to read and who are often concerned with discovering the most recent content. Similar to traditional news distribution networks, syndication becomes a logical method of exposing library content so it can be discovered.

Syndication can also be used to push information between library information systems. If only our systems could talk to one another. That would require vendors to open up their systems. The alternative is for libraries to create new development consortia to build new systems and thereby breaking away from the library systems paradigm. Sphere: Related Content