After being in development for around 9 months, we are proud to announce the first release of the PaySwarm Developer Sandbox. This release includes a working implementation of the PaySwarm universal payment platform, an OAuth-based REST API, and a WordPress plugin that allows articles to be sold in a standards-compliant manner.
PaySwarm Developer Sandbox Launched
Published May 5th, 2011The PaySwarm Vocabulary
Published March 31st, 2011In our push toward the first public release of the PaySwarm standard, development platform, and commercial release of the first PaySwarm Authority – we have released a key building block of the PaySwarm specification: The PaySwarm Vocabulary. The vocabulary outlines the concepts that are active on any PaySwarm-compliant network – people, financial accounts, assets, licenses, listings and contracts. The vocabulary is used by PaySwarm applications to communicate with one another using a common commerce language.
Towards Universal Web Commerce
Published January 31st, 2011The PaySwarm Reference Platform uses the Semantic Web. That means that it understands the information it reads in a web page and uses that knowledge to accomplish its tasks, for example, performing financial transactions. Machines understand what is in a web page by reading meta-data embedded in the page. The meta-data is expressed using a machine-readable vocabulary to describe human concepts. Vocabularies are basically dictionaries for computers – telling them more about each concept described by a particular term. In our push toward the first public release of the PaySwarm Reference Platform, we have released two of these vocabularies. One of them is for describing Commercial exchanges and one is for describing Digital Signatures. This blog post discusses what each one of them does and how they fit into the greater PaySwarm ecosystem.
Web Services: JSON vs. XML
Published November 22nd, 2010Recently a few XML experts have been claiming that the decision made by large Web Service providers, like Twitter and Foursquare, to drop XML from their Web Services infrastructure is not very interesting news. They also assert that the claims that JSON is more useful than XML for the majority of Web Services is wishful thinking by a “cadre of Web API designers” that have yet to provide “richer APIs”. As the rest of this post will attempt to explain, some of these folks may be missing the bigger sea change that is happening.
Linked Data for JSON
Published October 30th, 2010A global model for sharing information, once a dream, and then a reality with the Internet and the Web, is now becoming a fundamental part of the systems that we build. As we automate much of the sharing of information, we need to be able to express this shared data to computers in a way that is both easy for them to process and also easy for web developers to understand. We need a way of expressing Linked Data in JSON…
WebID – Universal Login for the Web
Published August 7th, 2010If there is one thing that is universal to all websites, it is the login process. Almost every website requires you to create an account, enter your e-mail address, verify your account, and log in before you can use any of the advanced features of the website.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a universal login mechanism for the web? One where you just had to click a login button and your browser would take care of filling out your account details? What if you didn’t need to remember different passwords to log into websites? What if we could do all of this and ensure that only you and the website you are communicating with would be able to see the data you are sending?
The good news is that there are some very smart people working on this problem. The solution is called WebID. The bad news is that there remained one problem that would take the browser vendors years to solve. That is, until Dave Longley (our CTO), discovered a way to make WebID work in all the current browsers in use today, including Internet Explorer…
Bitmunk 3.2.2: Good Relations and Greening
Published May 6th, 2010We are happy to announce the latest release of the Bitmunk Website and the PaySwarm software. It has been three months since our last release. This launch has a number of new features that are pretty exciting:
- Green Computing – We have replaced the standard Apache+PHP+Smarty web server stack with the Monarch Web server stack. This has improved performance by 468% and reduced the number of servers we need by a factor of 4. Reducing our carbon footprint by 4x is not only green, but greatly reduces long-term operating and maintenance costs as well.
- Semantic Web – We have published a new set of over 74 million pieces of machine-readable data in our pages, 11 million of which consist of pricing data via the Good Relations Vocabulary. We are using RDFa to publish the data.
- The Experience – Finding and buying what you want is now faster, with less annoying screens in the way between you and your music. The PaySwarm software now supports Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit versions).
Read on to find out more…
An Open Digital Media Commerce Standard
Published September 28th, 2009This article outlines how Digital Bazaar, since 2007, has been using Semantic Web Technology to establish a set of open mark-up and communication standards for Web-based, peer-to-peer marketplaces. The system that Digital Bazaar has created, called Bitmunk, is used to transact digital media such as music, movies, television and books between independent agents on the Web. The decentralzied nature of the peer-to-peer marketplace requires flexible, open standards for communication and knowledge representation…
First Editors Draft of HTML5+RDFa Published
Published July 13th, 2009The first public Editors Draft of RDFa for HTML5 was published earlier today. You can view the draft in two forms:
- The HTML5+RDFa Section (small 34K HTML document)
- The Complete HTML5+RDFa Specification (very large 4MB HTML document)
The blog post explains how this draft came to be, how it was published via the World Wide Web Consortium, and what it means for the future of RDFa and HTML5…
A Collaborative Distribution Model for Music
Published April 4th, 2009The music industry, via Choruss, is shopping a new music licensing model around to universities in the United States. Like some before it, this one attempts to address the still rampant music piracy occurring via peer-to-peer networks by enforcing a pseudo-mandatory collective licensing agreement on every student attending a participating university. There were a number of very interesting parts to the proposal that we would like to work on improving with Choruss and any partner universities. There were also a few propositions that we think are harmful to the industry, artists and fans as a whole.
It should be no surprise that we think that any sort of mandatory collective licensing is a very bad idea, as is the “covenant not to sue” approach that Choruss is currently pursuing. Voluntary collective licensing, as proposed by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is not a good alternative either…
W3C: RDFa 1.0 is Official
Published October 15th, 2008RDFa became an official World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation today. This means that it has undergone an intense amount of design, feedback, development and scrutiny to become a recognized world-wide standard for the expression of web semantics. Manu Sporny, Digital Bazaar’s Founder, has been directly involved with the RDFa Task Force and the standardization work…
Thoughts on HTML5, RDFa and Microformats
Published August 23rd, 2008This article was authored by one of our founders, Manu Sporny. He is an Invited Expert for the RDF in XHTML Task Force at the World Wide Web Consortium and a very active participant in the Microformats community. We are first and foremost a media services company serving the music, movie, television and electronic book…
The Next Generation of Bitmunk Technology
Published March 14th, 2008In the next several months, we will be releasing technology that has been in development in our R&D labs for over a year and a half. This will be version 3.0 of our technology and it is a massive leap in speed, size reduction, and interoperability. What follows is a quick run-down on what we’re…
Learn RDFa in 8 minutes
Published January 7th, 2008This is a follow-up to the video we released two weeks ago about the Semantic Web. The World Wide Web Consortium is working on a standard way to mark up semantics in XHTML called RDFa. We are heavily involved in RDFa development and believe it to be the right technology to express semantics on the…